PIANO CONCERTOS 1-4

Ronald Brautigam (fortepiano) & Die Kölner Akademie, Michael Alexander Willens

Met deze laatste aflevering van de integrale opname worden we geconfronteerd met Mozarts vroegste pogingen in dit genre: de zogenaamde vier "pastiche-concerten" uit 1767. In deze werken bouwt de elfjarige componist complete concerti op uit reeds bestaande sonatedelen

Mogelijk als een oefening die hij kreeg van zijn vader en leraar Leopold. Lange tijd werden deze concerti beschouwd als originele werken; pas in het begin van de 20e eeuw kwam aan het licht dat elf van de twaalf delen van deze vier concerti ontleend waren aan pianosonates van andere (nu vergeten) componisten zoals Rauppach, Honauer, Schobert, Eckard

Maar Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach is tenminste ook een keer van de partij. Alleen het langzame deel van het F-groot concerto is "echte Mozart", misschien geschreven in samenwerking tussen vader en zoon.

Final disc in Ronald Brautigam’s traversal of Mozart’s piano concertos. Throughout the ten previous discs in their series of Mozart’s complete piano concertos, Ronald Brautigam and Die Kölner Akademie have offered up fresh, sometimes bracing readings of these perennial favourites. ‘An ideal mixture of clarity and stylish effervescence’ (International Record Review), ‘as near as dammit what Mozart’s audiences would have heard’ (Classic FM Magazine) and ‘a completely new, crisp ‘Mozart-feel’ for the 21st century’ (Stereoplay) are just some of the responses from the international music press. Various instalments have also received special recommendations from websites and magazines such as Klassik-Heute.de, Luister, Scherzo and, most recently, Gramophone, which listed volume 6 (BIS-1844) among its ‘50 greatest Mozart recordings’. In this final volume we are treated to Mozart’s very earliest attempts in the genre – the four so-called ‘pasticcio concertos’ from 1767. In these works, the 11-year old budding composer expands existing sonata movements into proper concertos, possibly as part of an exercise given him by his father Leopold. For a long time the concertos were thought of as original works, and it was only at the start of the 20th century that the truth began to emerge. Of the twelve movements that make up these concertos, eleven are based on keyboard sonatas by other composers, and only one – the slow movement of K 37 – is an original composition, probably a collaboration between father and son. A few years later Mozart would adopt a similar approach in the three unnumbered concertos K 107 (appearing on the previous disc in this series), which were arrangements of sonatas by Johann Christian Bach. But in the case of concertos 1-4, each work is based on originals by more than one composer, and while the K 107 set are arrangements for keyboard and strings, the scorings here include woodwinds, and in K 40 also trumpets.

Mozart:
 Piano Concerto No. 1 in F major, K37
 Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, K39
 Piano Concerto No. 3 in D major, K40
 Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, K41

"Brautigam and Willens complete their superb Mozart concerto series with four very early pasticcio works."
MusicWeb International - 23rd November 2016

"Those wedded to Brautigam’s Mozart cycle will need no encouragement from me, but such is the communicativeness of the playing on this disc that its appeal reaches well beyond that."
Gramophone Magazine - January 2017

"Ronald Brautigam and Michael Alexander Willens offer characteristically lively performances"
BBC Music Magazine - March 2017 ****

"…stylish and well-scaled…Surround-sound in SACD recording is simply beyond criticism. A winner."
International Piano - May 2017 *****