MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 17 in G Major; Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major – The Cleveland Orch./ Mitsuko Uchida, p. and cond. – Decca

by | Dec 27, 2016 | Classical CD Reviews

Pianist-director Uchida instills both pomp and poetry into her latest survey of the Mozart concertos.

MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 17 in G Major, K. 453; Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major, K. 503 – The Cleveland Orch./ Mitsuko Uchida, piano and cond. – Decca 483 0716, 67:23 (10/28/16) [Distr. by Universal] **** :

Piano virtuoso Mitsuko Uchida (b. 1948) has systematically been re-examining the Mozart selected-concerto cycle, a project she embarked upon years ago with conductor Jeffrey Tate and the English Chamber Orchestra.  This present combination of the concertos in G Major and C Major completes her current project, the recordings made 11-13 February 2016 in live performance in Severance Hall, Cleveland.  We have had excellent Mozart from Cleveland prior, under George Szell, with such distinguished soloists as Rudolf Serkin and Robert Casadesus.  Auditors may find Uchida’s latest renditions somewhat precious and lacking in spontaneity, but the clarity and fluidity of ensemble remains undeniable. The two concertos, written for Mozart’s own use for a series of Vienna premieres between 1784-1786, gives us music which allowed Mozart to show off his keyboard virtuosity while he expanded his notion of concerto procedure, experimenting, for example, with the stile brise in the G Major Concerto and modal shifts in the huge C Major Concerto.

Uchida has a happily “singing” concept of Mozart’s keyboard style, and so the development section of the G Major Concerto first movement assumes a luxurious patina with the piano’s upward rocket figures and within the interplay with the Cleveland wind section. We often note how often Mozart favors wind ensemble textures for his piano concertos, with their concomitant chamber music textures. After just five bars in the Andante movement, Mozart breaks off the string sound so that the flute, oboe, and bassoon may indulge in an operatic trio. Here, the various “broken” melodic lines ask the piano to transition into the minor mode twice, before the piano has freer range to mount scalar passages that cover over two octaves.  My own teacher, Jean Casadesus, held an exalted opinion of this movement, which he often quoted in his Piano Literature class.  The wind trio dialogues with the keyboard late in the movement, ending with the piano’s trills and the suspended cadence for the intimate cadenza, the latter of which resembles several of the Mozart solo fantasies. The last movement, Allegretto – Finale: Presto, displays Mozart’s fertile imagination in variation form, often in the manner of opera buffa. Mozart writes out the repeats to add to the colossal dimension of his ironic wit, in which the bassoon has its share of the humor. Variation four descends into a haunted minor that hovers between Don Giovanni and the Masonic Funeral Music, only to be cast off rudely by an energized tutti. The extended coda emerges in the manner of Papageno/Papagena duet, all aflutter and in brilliant filigree, aided by clever wind figures. A series of false cadences permeates the close, as if Mozart were unwilling to part with such a clever, rambunctious child of his unique genius.

I owe my love for the 1786 Concerto No. 25 in C Major to Professor Waldbauer and his Form-and-Analysis class at SUNY Binghamton, in which he provided us a rubric for the piece, based on the aesthetic theory of affects: risoluto, espesssivo, dolce, and scherzando, each of which appears in exactly this sequence in the course of the epic first movement. Uchida softens the militant character of the opening theme, whose trumpets and drums soon yield to a tendency to declare c minor as the dominant mode of expression. The repeated four-note riff on G marks a new series of tunes that evolve – without the solo’s uttering the march theme in its own exposition. At moments, Uchida’s sonority plays alla musette, adding an especially delicate color to an otherwise majestic pageant and panoply of ideas.  The strict polyphony that intertwines the several moods and contrasting emotions of the movement testifies to Mozart’s synoptic vision, that same capacity for a contrapuntal paradigm that dominates his Jupiter Symphony.  The extensive discourse of the first movement has a tender reprieve in the Andante, with its penchant for long-held chords and pedal points, especially in the horns. The movement proceeds in the manner of an aria that soon becomes a timeless notturno for piano and various winds. The piano part from Uchida, too, comes in long notes that skip along two octaves.  The processional element returns for the Allegretto, a pomposo gavotte that serves for a rondo with an uncanny middle section in F Major. Here, Uchida has the support of the Cleveland cello line. Uchida milks this sequence for its Romantic content, abetted in her intensity by the woodwinds, particularly oboe and flute. The transition to the main rondo tune comes fluently and without affectation, a royal excursion into the pomp and circumstance of an aristocratic temperament. Once more, Mozart’s capacity to make scales sing comes to the fore in the tutti, and the Everest of piano concertos ends with decisive energy.

—Gary Lemco

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