Mozart: Fantasia in C minor, K475

Though Aldo Ciccolini has always held Clementi's Sonata Op.34 No. 2 close to his heart, he had never recorded it before.

"One shouldn’t be impatient in life, certain things demand a gestation period. I'm not impatient to play something, I need the time to find myself ", says Aldo Ciccolini.

More than just a CD, this new recording is testimony to the art of a living legend. Now 87 years of age, the master's source of wonder and appetite for music remain intact. This follows a first and highly-praised recording devoted to Mozart (LDV03).

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.

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.

TACET’s much praised recording technique enables these recordings of 1906 to be heard for the first time linked to a modern Steinway.

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.

We are delighted to present an eagerly awaited recital disc from Stephen Hough. This fascinating programme begins with some of Mozart’s most audacious and forward-looking piano works. Mozart’s Fantasia in C minor K475 is a wonderfully unfettered and uninhibited work, suffused with high drama and a sense of constantly shifting moods. The Piano Sonata in B flat major K333 is a similarly ground-breaking piece, developing in scale and drama from its lyrical, gentle opening.

The second part of the disc features Mozart as seen by others, from the homage of a near-contemporary right up to the modern day, with Hough’s own irresistibly quirky Mozart imaginings, and from elegant miniatures to Liszt/Busoni’s virtuosic Figaro Fantasy. This disc is full of surprises, and demonstrates the full range of Hough’s extraordinary artistry.