Mozart: Rondo in D major, K485

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.

Fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout continues his multi-disc survey of Mozart’s music for solo keyboard. Volume 2 features an instrument by Paul McNulty, modelled on a Viennese original by Anton Walter & Sohn (c.1802).

Kristian Bezuidenhout was born in South Africa in 1979. He first gained international recognition at the age of 21 after winning the prestigious first prize as well as the audience prize in the Bruges Fortepiano Competition after studying harpsichord with Arthur Haas, fortepiano with Malcolm Bilson and continuo playing and performance practice with Paul O’Dette. During this time he gained experience as a continuo player in Baroque opera productions in the USA and Europe. He is a frequent guest artist with the Freiburger Barockorchester, the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées, Les Arts Florissants, Concerto Köln and Collegium Vocale Gent, in many instances assuming the role of guest director. He has performed with celebrated artists including Philippe Herreweghe, Christopher Hogwood, Daniel Hope and Viktoria Mullova, and he regularly gives Lied recitals with, among others, Carolyn Sampson, Mark Padmore and Jan Kobow.

“Bezuidenhout is a prince of the fortepiano, making it sing in melodic phrases as no other practitioner of this intractable instrument has done in my experience.” The Times

"2006 will surely be full of celebratory concerts and recordings dedicated to a man born 250 years ago… The recital on this disc includes Mozart's structurally more 'free' music for piano: Rondos, Fantasies, and Preludes. He inherited these forms from Johann Sebastian Bach and, perhaps more importantly, through his sons Carl Philipp and Johann Christian.

The brooding opening of the great Fantasie in D minor, K397, gives way to a more light-hearted air. This piece has acquired a nineteenth-century editorial ending with no Mozartian provenance - the manuscript is incomplete. I offer an

'egarrtorial' option for the close of this little gem. Mozart originally intended the Fantasie in C minor, K396, to include a part for violin. Too little of this survives to make an adequate reconstruction. However, Abbé Maximilian Stadler (a close friend of Mozart, and a fine and interesting musician in his own right) made an admirable completion of this work for piano solo.

Although the second part gives way to fantasy of perhaps a more Schubertian nature, it is an extremely fine working of Mozart's material. The more structured pieces on the disc - the Rondos, Adagios, Marches, Minuett, and Gigue - demonstrate no less imagination and depth of character.

I end the programme with the Adagio in C major, K356, originally written for the Glass harmonika. I believe that using a fine original early piano can help us discover a multitude of colours in his music and bring us into Mozart's sound-world. I am very thankful he is still in our world at 250. Happy birthday!" Richard Egarr

The soprano Gemma Bertagnolli compares the music of Mozart to a country; “I feel welcome in this place of grandeur and miniature, of rigour and frivolity, of love and terror, of truth and jest.” She performs these works with passionate elegance.

German pianist Gesa Lucker made her concert debut aged 12. She has been a prize winner in national and international competitions and has performed at leading venues including the Carnegie Hall and the Wigmore Hall. This is her debut disc on Genuin Classics.

Beautiful music evoking the lost idyll of Constable's pastoral landscapes. Music by Beethoven and Mozart provides the period feel alongside gentle flute and piano pieces by Sterkel and Pleyel.

On 21 June 1987, before an ecstatic audience in Hamburg’s Musikhalle, 83-year-old Vladimir Horowitz gave the last concert of a career that stretched over nearly seven decades. The recital, taped by North German Radio (NDR), lay in their archives virtually untouched for more than 20 years (one encore was included in Deutsche Grammophon’s anthology The Magic of Horowitz in 2003). It is now being released in its entirety for the first time in any format. The repertoire is familiar, with Mozart and Schumann (Kinderszenen op. 15) to the fore. There is a last heroic assault on Chopin’s Polonaise in A flat op. 53 and the final scintillating encore is Moszkowski’s Etincelles, a Horowitz evergreen. The recording provides a unique souvenir of Horowitz’s final public appearance, where the sense of occasion and immediacy is palpable.