Mozart: Concerto for 2 Pianos and Orchestra No. 10 in E flat, K365 - download (MP3 & FLAC)

Thus did BBC Music Magazine praise Dedicated to Victims of War and Terror (DE3259), one of two previous Delos albums in which Maestro Constantine Orbelian – longtime Director of the Moscow Chamber Orchestra (MCO) – appears as the featured pianist. The other is Shostakovich – Schnittke: Piano Quintets (DE 1038). The present release, offering engaging concerto performances, is now Orbelian’s third recording for Delos as a pianist. Some fans of Orbelian’s work as conductor may still not be aware of his brilliant career as a concert pianist before he assumed the MCO’s directorship in 1991. Since then – despite his intermittent appearances as a pianist – his immense success as a conductor has overshadowed his reputation as a distinguished keyboard artist. With this sterling reissue, a new generation of listeners should come to appreciate his rare piano mastery. While all of these winning performances are with the MCO, they were recorded in the years just before Orbelian took over the orchestra. The three concertos with single piano were performed under the deft baton of previous MCO director Andrei Korsakov, whose untimely death in 1991 left the vacancy that Orbelian filled. Korean Maestro Nanse Gum expertly conducted the Mozart “Double” Concerto No. 10, also featuring noted American pianist Jonathan Shames. Orbelian’s trumpet partner in the Shostakovich is the Russian superstar Sergei Nakariakov, then only about 12 years old!

Recorded in 2008, respected pianist Derek Han provides a programme of rarer Mozart piano works

In this much requested re-issue, Chandos presents the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra performing Mozart’s Concerto for two pianos and Sinfonia concertante.

Both these works were written in Salzburg. The Concerto for two pianos was intended for performance by Mozart and his sister. With his justly famous Sinfonia concertante, boundlessly energetic in the outer movements and including a slow movement of quite remarkable poignancy, Mozart achieved one of his finest orchestral works before arriving in Vienna.

Under Iona Brown’s direction the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra became one of the finest such orchestras in the world. Gramophone made this recording ‘Critics’ Choice’ on its original release, describing it as bringing ‘performances at once scintillating and polished’. Classic CD wrote of the performances, ‘Iona Brown has the full measure of these works’ individuality and her direction, always alert to the implications of modulations, tempo and dynamic markings, is outstanding’.

Not long after his February 1934 London Queen’s Hall concert comprising three Mozart concertos, Schnabel made his first recording of a Mozart piano concerto, No. 27 in B flat major, K.595, at the recently opened and well equipped Abbey Road Studios. Completed in one session, this recording is notable not only for the excellence of its sound but for the moulding of the slow movement, taken at a slow tempo, but without any loss of the tension between successive notes or of the coherence of harmonic progressions. Schnabel’s recording of the Concerto for two pianos, with his son Karl Ulrich, is made up entirely of first takes. In the Rondo in A minor, K.511, Schnabel beautifully shapes the phrases and avoids sentimentality or overt intensity of expression.