Mozart: Fantasia in C minor, K475

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.

Dutch pianist Stanley Hoogland was a pioneer in the research and performance of the fortepiano in the early 1970’s. Since then he has become a frequent concert performer and currently teaches at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague and Amsterdam.

Fortepiano phenomenon Kristian Bezuidenhout begins his multi-volume traversal of Mozart’s music for solo keyboard.

Volume 1 features an instrument by Derek Adlam modeled on an original by Gabriel Anton Walter of the type Mozart owned in Vienna. Kristian Bezuidenhout studied with Rebecca Penneys, Malcolm Bilson and Paul O’Dette. 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 (2001), a double honour, this being only the third time the former prize has been awarded in the history of the competition. Bezuidenhout is a frequent guest artist with the world’s leading ensembles and he now has a standing duo with the baroque violinist Petra Müllejans, artistic director of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra; their first CD, a disc of Mozart Violin Sonatas, was released on harmonia mundi USA in the Spring of 2009. Highlights of past seasons have included a complete cycle of the late Mozart Piano Concertos and the Beethoven Piano Concertos (Amsterdam Concertgebouw) with the Orchestra of the 18th Century under Frans Bruggen. Plans for the future include concerts with the Orchestre des Champs Elysées under Philippe Herreweghe; a Mendelssohn project with the Freiburger Baroque Orchestra and Gottfried von der Goltz; a tour with Les Arts Florissants; trio concerts with Viktoria Mullova & Pieter Wispelwey and more recordings for harmonia mundi.