Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K503

The Vienna Concentus Musicus, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt & featuring acclaimed Austrian pianist Rudolf Buchbinder. Here, we have fresh & playful readings of two works from Mozart's "Figaro" year of 1786: the highly melodic A major concerto K.488 and the long & resplendent C major work K.503.

Friedrich Gulda has become something of a cult figure in the music world. This 2CD set presents him in Mozart recordings – both concertos and solo works – largely for Decca, with one item, the Piano Concerto No. 17, recorded for Amadeo.

Born in Vienna in 1930, Gulda began formal lessons aged seven with Felix Pazofsky, and within five years had graduated to the Vienna Music Academy. The Viennese classics – especially Mozart and Beethoven – quickly established themselves at the heart of Gulda’s performing repertoire but he was also a remarkable jazz performer. It was while he was rapidly absorbing jazz into his musical bloodstream that Gulda cut his first Mozart concerto recordings for Decca, starting in 1954 with KV 449. His accompanists, as on the coupling of KV 505 and 537 recorded almost exactly a year later, were the New Symphony Orchestra of London, a studio ensemble of hand-picked players, and conductor-composer Anthony Collins, who during the same period recorded the first complete cycle of Sibelius’s symphonies with the London Symphony Orchestra. What strikes one in particular about these recordings is their surprisingly ‘modern’ approach, free of Romantic rhetoric, with speeds effortlessly maintained and rhythms kept buoyant and sparkling, matched by a beguiling textural clarity and staccato precision.

The more overtly affectionate Viennese recording of KV 453 dates from 1960 and features another ad-hoc group, this time selected by Gulda himself, under Paul Angerer, a Hans Swarowsky protégé who was then rapidly establishing his conducting credentials having spent the early part of his career playing viola in the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

Mozart’s piano sonatas are often treated as second-class citizens by comparison with the concertos, yet for Gulda they were an essential part of his creative output. ‘The sonatas are private preliminary conversations leading to the operas,’ he reasoned. Gulda’s first recordings for Decca were captured in 1947 and the following year he turned his hands to Chopin and Mozart’s KV 576 Sonata, a reading whose micro-inflected tonal purity and seamless cantabile is reminiscent of Dinu Lipatti.

Bringing Gulda’s lifelong devotion to Mozart full close, he once expressed a peculiar desire to die on Mozart’s birthday. Remarkably, on 27 January 2000, exactly 244 years after Mozart was born, Gulda passed away, aged 69.

Ronald Brautigam, with the congenial support of Die Kölner Akademie, under Michael Alexander Willens, here performs Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos. 24 and 25, both composed in 1786.

The C major concerto is in fact one of the most expansive of all classical piano concertos, rivalling Beethoven’s fifth concerto. Their grandeur immediately made them popular fare in the concert hall – Mendelssohn, for instance, had No.24 in his repertoire through the 1820s and 1830s.

On his copy of a fortepiano from 1795, and with orchestral forces corresponding to what Mozart would have been familiar, Brautigam creates a sound of which Mozart would have been familiar.

On the first release in the team’s traversal of Mozart’s concertos (BIS-SACD-1794), Brautigam was described by International Record Review as ‘an absolutely instinctive Mozartian, with… melodic playing of consummate beauty’, going on to congratulate him on finding the ‘ideal partners’ for the project.’

David Fray – named Instrumentalist of the Year in France’s Victoires de la Musique 2010 – retains his focus on Austro-German repertoire with his second CD of concertos for Virgin Classics: Mozart’s Concertos Nos 22 and 25 with London’s Philharmonia Orchestra under Dutch violinist-turned-conductor (and Music Director of the Dallas Symphony), Jaap van Zweden.

“Above all, I would like to advocate a certain vision of music and to make it accessible without altering its value or the level on which it operates.” David Fray – Instrumentalist of the Year in France’s Victoires de la Musique 2010 – turns to Mozart for his second CD of concertos for Virgin Classics. The response of The Sunday Times to his last solo release was: “No Schubert-lover should miss this piano recital by David Fray,” while The Guardian evoked “pianism of the highest class”.

Fray’s last release was a solo programme of Schubert, a figure who embodies the transition to Romanticism from the Classicism of Mozart, a fellow Austrian. The recital was praised by the critics for its distinctive and many-layered interpretation: “No Schubert-lover should miss this piano recital by David Fray,” urged the BBC Music Magazine, while The Sunday Times felt that: “These are wonderful performances by the young French pianist David Fray, a player with a beautiful touch and the finest control of dynamics and chording ... By taking his time, without ever weakening the music’s inexorable momentum, Fray fills every note with meaning, in such a way that we feel intensely each mercurial change of mood and colour and texture, relish Schubert’s astonishing harmonic invention to the full, and relive the heartbreak, the ferocity, the elation, the visionary flights of these inexhaustible works.” The Guardian was enthused by “the sheer lucidity and polish of Fray's playing, its exceptional command of colour and touch, and the way he invariably uses that range of sound to point up musical structures in a meaningful way … pianism of the highest class.”

A special 2-CD set comprising Mozart's late piano concertos in stylish and masterly interpretations from Alicia de Larrocha.

Released as a tribute to the great Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha who recorded for Decca for over twenty years from 1969, and who died on 25 September 2009.

Concertos 24 & 26 (recorded in March 1985) receive their first ever release and this has been made possible with the co-operation of both Alicia de Larrocha's family and the estate of Sir Georg Solti.

Concertos 25 & 27 (recorded in December 1977) receive their first international CD release.

CD booklet contains an appreciation of Alicia de Larrocha A Born Mozartian by piano expert Jeremy Siepmann.

‘The performances are consistently of the highest quality…’ Penguin Guide 08