MOZART: Piano Concertos, Vol. I = Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor; Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major; Piano Concerto No. 26 in D Major “Coronation”; Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat Major – Vassily Primakov, p./Odense Symphony Orch./Scott Yoo – Bridge (2)

by | Jun 25, 2010 | Classical CD Reviews | 0 comments

MOZART: Piano Concertos, Vol. I = Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor, K. 491; Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major, K. 503; Piano Concerto No. 26 in D Major, K. 537 “Coronation”; Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat Major, K. 595 – Vassily Primakov, piano/Odense Symphony Orchestra/Scott Yoo – Bridge 9328A/B (2 CDs), 63:54, 62:46 [Distr. by Albany] ****:


Russian piano virtuoso Vassily Primakov (b. 1979) has decided to survey the Mozart piano concertos, and it looks as if this project began in earnest 17-20 November 2008, with the inscriptions of the concertos in C Minor and Major in Odense Denmark. With equally youthful Scott Yoo at the helm of the Odense Symphony, the opening Concerto in C Minor makes a lavish and often profoundly effectual debut for this series. Many would consider the 1786 C Minor Concerto Mozart’s most influential creation in the genre, an uncompromising fusion of drama and lyrical melancholy. The prominence of the first movement bassoon part almost equals the dark flourishes in the keyboard, competing as it does with a large ensemble rife with harmonic and metric clashes much at odds with the amiable singspiel/opera The Impresario and The Marriage of Figaro contemporary with its composition. Much credit to producer David Starobin and engineer Viggo Mangor for the sonic splendor and balances Primakov and Yoo achieve in the working-out of this somberly beautiful music. The cadenza by Gabriel Faure (1902) turns the four-beat tragic motif into a pearly carillon, introspective and eminently romantic.  

The E-flat Major Larghetto plays as an elegant serenade or romance for piano, winds, and strings. The theme-and-eight-variations Allegretto finale projects a remarkable poise for such a pair of youthful Mozarteans, an affect both wistful and wise. As in the Larghetto, the hue and color of the low strings and clarinets conveys a burnished understated intensity. Yoo adds a touch of militant tragedy to the original statement to ensure that even the C Major Variation V and the concluding siciliana will not assuage the mortal coil that surrounds this fateful work which Beethoven, too, found powerfully compelling.

The huge Concerto No. 25 in C Major (1786) lies on a plateau of grandeur in the same way a poem by Milton dwarfs the poets who might be read on the same program.  In scope and breadth it rivals the Jupiter Symphony, especially as it embraces the sequence of affects–risoluto, espessivo, dolce and Scherzino—in turn and develops each of its several expositional motifs. The wonderful play on the dominant G as both a center of ostinato gravity–see Beethoven’s G Major Concerto for a quick allusion–and a launching site for exquisite fioritura from the keyboard dazzles both the mind and heart for its innate simplicity of means. The piano descends into the tonic minor for shades of life’s darker colors. Primakov and Yoo–like their worthy predecessors Gieseking and Rosbaud–maintain a taut flexible line that never wavers in its basic pulse. The six part canon that evolves under and over the keyboard’s Mannheim rockets in the course of the development is another of those Mozart miracles of multi-tasking in music. For his first movement cadenza, Primakov adapts one by Hummel for his own plastic uses.

A lovely operatic aria in F Major opens the Andante, the flute and oboe each making its respective contribution. The hue has a melancholy air, close to “Dove sono.” Primakov and the woodwinds move in finely-honed balance through this music’s often semplice utterances, the ornamentation chaste, in the aesthetic that in Mozart’s case, less is often more. The 2/4 Allegretto proceeds as a lively rondo-sonata that employs a gavotte from the opera Idomeneo (1781), and Yoo imbues it with a lively and forceful cantering gait. Primakov’s piano tone immediately produces music-box sonorities in the course of its 16th notes and triplet runs. The punctuations from horns and tympani underline both the grace and the force of Mozart’s writing. The incursions into minor modes and the wonderful colloquy between piano, oboe, and flute add a piquancy that can only be called Mozartean. Primakov injects a bit of humor in his quirky little transition to the gavotte theme’s re-emergence in the recapitulation. The entire concerto has evoked only notions of aristocratic nobility on a cosmic scale.


For those of us who first heard Mozart’s splendidly pompous 1784 D Major “Coronation” Concerto with Wanda Landowska and Eugene Bigot, the fact that Vassily Primakov utilizes Landowska’s first movement cadenza (rec., 5-6 October 2009) comes as a gentle irony.  Primakov relishes the long arches of brilliant fioritura and chromatic modulations that pepper the work with an ambiance that prefigures Beethoven and the Romantics. The orchestral opulence from Yoo and the Odense Symphony–employing as they do Mozart’s heraldic trumpets and drums–quite fills out the sound space as Primakov executes his right hand tempests with virile and canny aplomb. The A Major Larghetto proceeds with a dainty gavotte-like grace that bows to Le Nozze di Figaro, beautifully nuanced with limpid touches of flute and assorted winds, sans trumpets and drums. The witty Allegretto offers another music-box tune, the movement redolent with delicacy and pomp, divided into seven feline sections, each spirited and brilliantly magisterial.

Finally, the “Abschied” B-flat Concerto, K. 595 of his last year 1791,which can never escape our hindsight–despite the fact that sketches for it go back to 1788–that it would be Mozart’s farewell to this instrumental form which he mastered with such easy facility.

An admixture of songfulness and nostalgic wistfulness permeates this epic work, and Yoo set the tone from the outset, the woodwinds rife with a scented languor. The music modulates quickly into minor keys, an adumbration of the development section whose mercurial transformations in chromatic color well attune us to the later world of Franck and Bruckner. Mozart maintains his nobility of mien despite the often grueling pathos beneath the glittery surface. Nothing effete in Primakov’s pearly playing, fleet and pointed as it is. What an air mystery he adds to the alchemy at the piano’s entrance to development, followed by dialogue from the clarinet and oboe. The rising scales in canonic harmony suggest some revelation from the sea, perhaps the birth of Venus from the mutilation of Uranus.  A mood of transcendent intimacy marks Primakov’s E-flat Larghetto opening, the French horn and strings adding to the valediction. A hybrid ternary form and rondo, the movement swells with haunted grandeur, in the manner of the Andante from the G Minor Symphony. Something of the former brilliance of the earlier concertos returns with the Rondo, the “hunting” motif a close cousin of the finale to the F Major Concerto, K. 459. Here, however, Mozart indulges in the minor keys so as to place a pall or passing shadow on the gaiety and revelry of the surface figures, Poe’s old conceit that “laughs but smiles no more.” Even if this music depicts an emotional sunset, the iridescent colors and sheer fluidity of means convince us that the journey has born nothing but the harmonious fruits of vast experience.

Quite a marvelous beginning for a complete Mozart cycle, as intelligently enthusiastic as it is lovely. 



–Gary Lemco