Mozart: Violin Sonata No. 32 in B flat major, K454

According to legend, Mozart was so rushed when writing K379 and K454 that he was forced to première the pieces with incomplete piano parts. Paying homage to this spirit of spontaneity in a programme of some of Mozart's most beloved chamber works, Petra Müllejans and Kristian Bezuidenhout present a reading of these pieces that recaptures the freshness and volatility of those early performances.

Mozart had been an outstanding exponent of both the violin and the keyboard ever since childhood, and he extended the limits of the collaboration between the two instruments by freeing the violin from its dependence on the keyboard, thereby revealing both sides of himself at the same time. In this first volume of the Mozart Sonatas for Violin and Piano, the multi-talented and multi-faceted Dmitry Sitkovetsky has selected a program of Mozart’s youthful masterworks. Joined by pianist Antonio Pappano, Sitkovetsky gives full expression to Mozart’s genius – coming across as comical, as in the delightful variations in the A Major sonata K.305, composed in all probability in the early summer of 1778 in Paris; but also able to give expression to the tragic situations that can arise in a young life, as in the E Minor sonata K.304, whose deathly chill came as a direct reaction to the death of his mother.