Mozart: Piano Sonata No. 10 in C major, K330

SFZ Music, the independent label for His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts, are pleased to announce their latest release, a recording given by one of the finest scholar-performers currently working in Britain.

John Irving is an internationally recognised Mozart scholar, having written five books including the international best-selling 'The Treasures of Mozart', and also widely acclaimed as one of the finest interpreters of keyboard music from the early classical period.

'Mozart on the Hass Clavichord' is a programme showcasing the wonderful instrument by Johann Adolph Hass (1715-76) made in Hamburg in 1763 and currently residing in the Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments.

Irving explores in detail historical performance practice issues, as well as reminding us that the Clavichord remained a favoured instrument for Mozart throughout his life, and accenting the intimate, domestic nature of his keyboard music.

Although he attended the Leipzig Conservatory at the age of ten and five years later studied with Liszt’s pupil Eugen d’Albert for a short time, Wilhelm Backhaus (1884-1969) otherwise received no formal training. He was no stranger to England, having made his London début at the age of sixteen and, when only twenty-one, in the same year that he won the Anton Rubinstein prize in Paris, he took up a post at the Royal Northern College of Music. While there Backhaus deputised for an indisposed Alexander Siloti at a Manchester Hallé Orchestra concert under the great Austro-Hungarian conductor Hans Richter (1843-1916). It was Richter who had conducted the Vienna première of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and he offered interpretive advice to Backhaus.

In April 1960 Backhaus was at the BBC for a broadcast of three Beethoven Sonatas – Les Adieux, Op.81a, Moonlight, Op.27 No.2 and the last great Piano Sonata in C minor, Op.111. The latter two from this particular broadcast are heard here and most interesting in the C minor Sonata is the tempo Backhaus chooses for the Arietta. Marked Adagio molto semplice e cantabile and often played extremely slowly, Backhaus begins more at an Andante. In doing so he retains a constant tempo throughout and does not speed up for the later variations as some pianists do. The duration of just over thirteen minutes for this movement, including all the repeats, is almost identical to both his mono and stereo studio recordings whereas Wilhelm Kempff, in his mid 1960s recording, takes fifteen and a half minutes.

Backhaus only recorded a handful of Sonatas and Concertos by Mozart. He played K.330, K.331 and K.332, works favoured by many pianists, but he also played two of the earlier Piano Sonatas – K.282 and K.283. For the BBC recital in November 1961 Backhaus chose to play K.330 in C major and K.332 in F major. With a career beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing to the end of the 1960s, the young Backhaus would have been influenced by the performance practices of the mid-nineteenth century in Mozart playing through the ‘Dresden china’ school of playing Mozart of the 1950s. In the outer movements Backhaus tends to slow down for the second subjects to give a different and contrasting character and in the slow movements he plays with a depth of tone and feeling that may be frowned upon by some urtext performers who think they know the ‘correct’ way to play Mozart. Backhaus knew that the music speaks for itself and his line of thought and sense of structure are always clear and never sentimental. The studio recital ended with Beethoven’s Les Adieux Sonata.

Noriko Ogawa follows her recordings of Debussy’s solo piano works (BISCD1955/56) and Rachmaninov’s First and Fourth Piano Concertos (BIS-CD-975) with three piano sonatas by Mozart.

The three sonatas here are often grouped together as ‘the Paris Sonatas’.

At the time, Mozart was establishing himself in Vienna, and composed piano sonatas to exploit the growing market for printed music and to use as teaching material.

More than 200 years later these particular sonatas remain among Mozart’s best-loved compositions.

Released for the first time in 2003 and 2005, this two-CD set combines two Mozart recordings in which Andreas Staier raises the questions of ornamentation and improvisation with a hefty dose of impishness in his interpretative options (as in ‘his' Rondo alla turca!).

Andreas Staier plays a fortepiano by Monika May, Marburg, 1986, after Anton Walter, Vienna, 1785.

World-renowned pianist Maria Joao Pires performs Mozart's 10th, 11th, 12th and 14th sonata at super-budget price.

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

The Canadian musician Glenn Gould was undoubtedly one of the greatest pianists of all time. To mark the 75th anniversary of his birth, and the 25th anniversary of his death, Sony BMG Masterworks presents this seminal artist’s vinyl recordings as re-mastered CDs, designed to replicate the exact artwork of the original gramophone records in miniaturised form. Already issued as part of an 80-CD box set (88697130942), these albums are now being made available individually, with the first 20 in the series being released in November 2007.