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

Ondine is pleased to release its first chamber music recording from violinist Christian Tetzlaff, featuring his long time pianist Lars Vogt.

The selection of these sonatas for piano and violin by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart demonstrate the composer’s genius and show a wide range of emotions.

Christian Tetzlaff is considered as one of the very best violinists in the world. His recording of the violin concertos by Mendelssohn and Schumann, released on Ondine in 2011 (ODE 1195-2) was greeted with considerable acclaim.

Lars Vogt was appointed the first ever “Pianist in Residence” by the Berlin Philharmonic in 2003/04 and enjoys a high profile as a soloist and chamber musician.

2013 will see a Schumann Sonata release by Tetzlaff and Vogt on Ondine.

Catherine Mackintosh and Geoffrey Govier formed Duo Amadè in the 1980s, specifically to perform the charming and intimate works for keyboard and violin by Mozart in concert.

This disc marks the conclusion of the five-volume series. ‘Engaging performances that gently seduce the listener… so alluring and believable it feels as though one has travelled back in time in a musical Tardis’, wrote Classic FM of Vol. 4 (CHAN0781). In this final volume, featuring the sonatas KV 454 and KV 547, Duo Amadè once again offers historically informed performances of a similar spirit and style.

The violinist Catherine Mackintosh has long been recognised as a pioneering early music performer, and in recording the complete cycle of duo sonatas by Mozart she is fulfilling the ambition of a lifetime. Best known as the former leader of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, she plays with The Purcell Quartet, among others, and is a distinguished teacher.

Her partner in Duo Amadè is the fortepianist Geoffrey Govier, who over the last twenty years has worked with singers such as Gerald Finley, Charles Daniels, and Catherine Bott, the horn player Andrew Clark, and the chamber groups Ensemble Galant and The Revolutionary Drawing Room. He finds time for both editorial work and research into the development of the fortepiano.

Geoffrey Govier plays an instrument made by Christopher Clare in Cluny after Anton Walter, while Catherine Mackintosh plays a violin by Giovanni Grancino, dating from 1703. The instruments bring a lightness and freshness of articulation to these delightful works, entirely in keeping with the spirit of enlightenment in which the sonatas were written.

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.

Friederike Starkloff began studying the violin at the age of 5. She has competed in many national and international competitions and in 2009 gained second place at the International Lepold Mozart Competition in Augsberg, which brought this recording about.

Mozart and Beethoven were the same age when they wrote the pieces assembled here. The tempestuous enthusiasm of their 27 years of age clearly shines in this music. Indeed, their youth and vitality sparkle, but so does also the incandescent youth of the pianoforte, which had finally reached its full potential. To this we may add a youthfulness of style and aesthetics, continuously inventing and reinventing themselves, searching new codes and opposing recent fashionable trends.

The first half of the XVIIIth century, which had promoted the violin to the rank of royal ambassador of its instrumental music, imposed for a long time everywhere in Europe and particularly with French and Italian composers-violinists, the corellian model of the sonata for violin solo and basso continuo. The second half of the century will crown the pianoforte, imposing its rule after its irrepressible dominance over the harpsichord in the 1780ies and offering a new expressive palette to chamber music as well as to the piano sonata.

A new facet of a violinist crosses the discovery of a new talent at the keyboard; a disc not to be missed!...

In these sonatas, both instruments are given equal status and are performed here on period instruments. The legendary artist Paul Badura-Skoda was a pioneer in using period instruments in performance. Irnberger has impressed critics with his Mozart interpretations: “When the violin sings arias”.

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.