Andrew Manze’s first recording as artistic director of The English Concert was a program of Mozart’s orchestral music, and now, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, he returns as period-instrument performer in three violin sonatas Mozart premiered (in two-piano versions) with his most gifted pupil, Josepha Auernhammer. The first is light and joyful; the others are more forward looking, with melancholy slow movements and an explosiveness that sometimes points toward Beethoven. These are hardly the first recordings of the works on period instruments–fine ones have appeared on the Accent, Auvidis, Elektra, Erato, Harmonia Mundi and Opus 111 labels. But more than most of the other artists, Manze conveys what he calls Mozart’s “revolutionary spirit,” digging into the music with a passion missing from even some well-known accounts on modern instruments. This is particularly telling in the slow movements of K. 377 and 380, which achieve unusual depth of feeling without Romantic mannerisms. Manze and Egarr–every bit the expressive partner–are recessed in a reverberant acoustic that nonetheless conveys immediacy complete with occasional bite. The fragment completed by Maximilian Stadler caps a disc that sets new performance standards for the sonatas as performed on period instruments.
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...