Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A Mozart survey

2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/em/cam001

1741-7260

P. Branscombe,

Music and Audio Processing

It is no surprise that the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth last year was marked by the release of a plethora of recordings, old and new, on CD and DVD. One might even feel that saturation point has been reached, so huge has the output proved. Seven recordings sit on my desk for review—a tiny sample out of several hundred that in one way or another celebrated the Mozart Year. Chance dictates that what calls for attention amounts to three discs of chamber music, one of Lieder, a coupling of two keyboard concertos, and two of the stage works. Let us consider them in that order. Sigiswald Kuijken and Luc Devos have over the last decade and a half made their unhurried way through the Sonatas for fortepiano and violin (Accent ACC 20041, rec 1991–2005, 299′). These date from Mozart's last years in Salzburg, the months spent in Mannheim on the tour to Paris that ended his mother's life, and the Vienna years. On five CDs (one of them very short) they play 15 works; by comparison, the new DG set recorded by Anne-Sophie Mutter and Lambert Orkis includes 16 sonatas on one disc fewer, with no sense of overcrowding. Of course, the most obvious difference is that, whereas Mutter and Orkis play instruments in standard modern condition (and do so superbly), Kuijken and Devos favour period instruments: the former, a warm-toned Milanese violin of c.1700 by Giovanni Grancinoi; the latter, two fortepianos by the modern Brussels maker Claude Kelecom after a 1788 original by J. A. Stein of Augsburg (whom Mozart admired greatly). Presumably it was Kelecom's developing skills as a maker that led Devos, after the recording of the first three discs (in the early 1990s), to prefer a later instrument by him for the final two that were made in 2005; both produce fine tonal variation and reliable mechanism, though there is an occasional jangle at the extremes of the range. A drawback to my enjoyment of and admiration for this set is that all the sessions took place in the Vereengde Doopsgezinde Kerk at Haarlem, which has too cavernous an acoustic for this music and these instruments. This problem occurs most obviously on the two latest discs, containing five of the six sonatas dedicated to the Electress of the Palatinate, and K377, the big F major work with a theme-and-variation slow movement. Detail rarely gets lost in these thoughtful and stylish readings; both artists are happy to submerge their personalities in passages where the other (it is more often the keyboard-player) has the limelight. A possible criticism is that the playing at times feels rather undifferentiated, lacking the passionate commitment of other partnerships. Kuijken and Devos have a generous attitude to repeats and dynamic contrast, though this seldom extends beyond a literal-minded approach. A minor inconvenience: the gaps between movements and even works are sometimes needlessly brief. At present Kuijken and Devos seem to have the ‘period’ field to themselves; prospective purchasers might like to be reminded of the proven virtues of the partnerships of Henryk Szeryng and Ingrid Haebler, Szymon Goldberg and Radu Lupu, Itzhak Perlman and Daniel Barenboim, and, most recently, the DG album referred to above.