Mozart: Keyboard Concertos Nos. 1-4 - K. 37, 39, 40, 41
As the valuable introductory essay by Cliff Eisen points out, the starting-point for Mozart's earliest keyboard concertos are works by German composers whom Leopold Mozart mentions as being popular in Paris in the mid 1760s: Schobert, Eckard and Honauer – to which list Leopold might have added Raupach, another prominent German-born composer in Paris at that time. Mozart's earliest concertos are all pasticcios, orchestrations (at times extensive recompositions) of keyboard sonata movements (just one of the 12 models may be a Mozart original; and one is by C. P. E. Bach). They date from spring and summer 1767, when the composer was 11 – though, as much of the handwriting indicates, his father was deeply involved in the composition, or at the very least in the committing to paper, of these fascinating pieces.A second essay in the insert booklet is an equally interesting note on performance and improvisation written by the soloist, Robert Levin, who here plays a clean-toned and attractive double-manual harpsichord constructed in 1997 by Peter Bravington after models by Goermans (Paris, 1764) and Taskin (Paris, 1784). Although there have been delightful recordings of these works on fortepiano (notably by Ingrid Haebler, with Eduard Melkus and his Vienna Capella Academica), and on a modern concert grand (here I think particularly of Murray Perahia and his affectionate, unfussy and eminently stylish performances with the ECO), they are especially well suited to the harpsichord, here accompanied in ideal balance by two dozen musicians of the Academy of Ancient Music, under Christopher Hogwood's spirited and perceptive direction, and with fine recorded quality. The only doubt I have concerns the sometimes almost frenetically busy realization of the keyboard part, for instance in the Andante staccato of K39 in B flat. In general, there is a refreshing spring to the rhythms as well as refinement, wit and – in the spontaneity of Levin's embellishments and cadenzas – a return to the spirit of a more adventurous age. Highly recommended.Peter Branscombe--From International Record Review - subscribe now