Mozart: Piano Sonata No. 8 in A minor, K310

The legendary Paul Badura-Skoda pays tribute to the Romanian pianist Dinu Lipatti, who sixty years ago gave his last recital in the Kursaal of Besançon. Here, Badura-Skoda performs the programme of this historic concert.

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.

Lipatti’s recorded legacy is small. Regis presents a selection of his recordings for EMI which best display this iconic pianist’s artistic diversity. Included are sonatas by Scarlatti, Mozart, Chopin and his compatriot Enescu and extracts from Brahms’ Waltzes Op.39 with Nadia Boulanger.

'To his wife he [Lipatti] said, "You see, it is not enough to be a great composer. To write music like that you must be a chosen instrument of God." By the same light we may say that it is not enough to be a great pianist: to play as Lipatti played you must be a chosen instrument of God. God lent the world His chosen instrument who we called Dinu Lipatti for too brief a space.’ Walter Legge

After a brief absence from the concert platform, Hélène Grimaud is back and presenting a brand new solo recital programme, which she will take on a world-wide tour during the upcoming concert season.

The pianist has conceived another programme of works spanning a wide range of emotions and styles, yet all linked by their origin in that singular musical line of succession: the great composers of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Her new album bears the title Résonance, reflecting Grimaud’s imaginative approach to this stimulating compilation of masterpieces.

Hélène Grimaud brings all her artistic maturity and a perfect balance between intellect and emotion to bear on highly dramatic sonatas by Mozart – the A minor K.310 – Liszt and Berg, leavened by Bartók’s irresistible Romanian Folk Dances.

For Grimaud the keystone here is Alban Berg’s hyper-charged, ultra-romantic Opus 1. In this highly concentrated work, the fascinating interrelationships, resonances, between the composers and pieces are summarized and condensed. “This is a music drama in the miniature form of a single-movement sonata,” comments Grimaud, “a maximum of expression that seems to emanate directly from the heart – contained within a piece of incredibly clear structure.”

In its prodigious diversity, a blend of lightheartedness and sharpness, elegance and severity, Mozart’s music is the mirror of his life, which was marked by a succession of harrowing crises and wonderful breakthroughs. Moreover, he himself said he was constantly torn between anguish and joy. In 1778, while he was staying in Paris and in a sad and sombre mood, Mozart composed several piano sonatas, including the dramatic K.310 Sonata, written in that key of A minor which Alfred Einstein said was the key of desolation, the celebrated K.331 Sonata, in the French style and ending famously with its joyous rondo Alla turca (with a coda added in 1784), and the K.333 Sonata over which hovers the shade of Johann Christian Bach, youngest son of Johann Sebastian, to whom Mozart was bound in sincere friendship.

Completed on 20 May 1785, the tragic Fantasia in C minor, K.475, was published under Mozart’s supervision in the same year, together with the Sonata in C minor, K.457. This seemingly free and improvisatory but in fact cleverly constructed work comprises several sections in which lyrical episodes of striking pathos mingle with tormented passages with intense emotional content. The variety of Mozart’s thought and the boldness of his harmonies are here quite exceptional.

Two famous LPs on CD. Excellent sound quality.

“Brendel’s 1968 performance of No. 9 is quite outstanding, elegant and beautifully precise….orchestra is just right…the performance of No. 14 is also first rate… a memorably vivacious finale. Outstanding re-issue with natural sound….clean remastering.” Penguin Guide

“This concerto (K271), described by Brendel as one of the wonders of the world and a vision of everything the classical piano could become, was also a favourite of Busoni. In a recent interview Brendel admitted that he struggled with Mozart in early years but found the key to its interpretation during the Fischer master classes he attended as an 18 year old (playing the K310 Sonata).” James Murray