MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor, K. 491; Piano Concerto No. 26 in D Major, K. 537; Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major, K. 503; Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat Major, K. 595 – Alicia de Larrocha/Chamber Orchestra of Europe/London Philharmonic Orchestra (K. 503; K. 595)/ Sir Georg Solti
Decca B0014538-02 2 CD 63:10; 65:40 [Distr. by Universal] ****:
This long-suppressed pair of Mozart concertos in C Minor and D Major derive from what producer Michael Haas calls “an initial edit” made at Henry Wood Hall (1985); the earlier set taped in Kingsway Hall (1977), the C Major and B-flat Major, enjoy their first international release. Both De Larrocha and Solti felt that Henry Wood Hall projected a dark ambience that demanded post-production. Producer Haas avers that the playing, surprisingly accurate for a first take, is as close to a live performance as one could ask for from “a studio situation.”
Alicia de Larrocha (1923-2009) maintained a fine repute for her chastity and taste in performance, her relatively small stature and small hands having been surmounted by a big imagination and a lifetime of stretching exercises. Her penchant for the clear, plastic line made her a natural Mozart exponent, and in these four virtuoso concertos none so well accommodates her fluency and rhythmic vitality as the under-rated “Coronation” Concerto in D Major. Scholars have an unfortunate tendency to relegate this superb work to “mere” bravura status, but for me its huge supple canvas and elegant self-assurance provide any number of lustrous moments, as the pianism of luminaries Landowska, Casadesus, and Anda has already testified. The Larrocha pearly play in the no less colossal C Major Concerto, K. 503 proves equally thrilling in its forward propulsion, the epic periods never overplayed, nor the music-box sonorities allowed to devolve into “Dresden China” busywork. The transparency of parts in the last movement of the K. 503 never belies the musical fury that can erupt from Mozart’s buffa lines, the dynamic palette from De Larrocha literally kaleidoscopic in its flurries of runs and changes of color against the oboe, bassoon, and flute. The brilliant filigree might be that of Soler, except the scale and architectural polish of the runs and scales lies on an epic proportion.
One can even detect a perpetual smile in the often surly conducting style of Sir Georg Solti (1912-1997), whom Barry Tuckwell once characterized as having the personality of ” a Chicago gangster.” Like the equally petulant George Szell, who made a career of having become Uncle Scrooge, Solti melted that grave waxen image in the throes of Mozart, who can turn any misanthrope into a human being. The intimacy Solti instills into the C Minor Concerto comes as more than a “pleasant surprise”; the piece gains a sense of valediction that attests to a tragic grandeur, on a par with the Requiem and periods from the C Minor Mass. The B-flat Concerto, too, plays like a gorgeously-mounted chamber piece, a true ensemble of color in which the keyboard part often acts as primus inter pares, a leading voice who shares operatic gestures with a woodwind quartet and a body of strings. Solti often subdues a crescendo to prepare–or insinuate–the regal entry of the piano part, a splendid instance of the aesthetic axiom that less is more. The cadenza by the composer, a rather free fantasia in softly militant gestures, asserts a virile delicacy, not precious, and letter-perfect. The last two movements seem to me to realize that “mingled measure of the fountain and the caves” to which Coleridge compared the “esemplastic” imagination. Here–rather in memoriam–we have a set that bears repeated musical scrutiny for profoundly aerial pleasures, intellectual and emotional.
–Gary Lemco
