Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos 14 & 23
Dejan Lazić (piano); Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra/Jan Willem de Vriend
Challenge Classics CC 72945 55:08 mins
A stylish opening tutti grabs the attention immediately in the A major Concerto: de Vriend’s background in historically informed performance produces minimal vibrato, tight phrasing and a transparent texture, despite the modern instruments in the orchestra. Lazić is equally scrupulous in his first entry, mentioning in his note the challenge of ‘carefully balancing voicing, phrasing, articulation, rhetoric and dynamics’ on a modern concert grand. There’s sometimes a hardness to his tone, exaggerated by his forward presence in the recording, and this shows especially in his own cadenza, which strays into Beethovenian rhetoric at times. The Adagio is shaped persuasively overall, with finely judged dynamics and eloquently turned ornaments, although a more yielding piano sound wouldn’t come amiss, and that’s also true in the finale, which needs to dance more lightly on its feet.
In the E flat Concerto, the story is much the same, with crystalline fingerwork in the first movement, but some very aggressive chords that leap out of the texture. Again, Lazić’s cadenza is inventive, but less forcefully projected than in the A major Concerto. For much of the Andantino, there is the feeling of a tender dialogue, but at climaxes the dynamics creep out of the Classical world into something more appropriate to the Romantic period, which chimes in with Lazić’s view of the work as forward-looking. The finale here does have a sense of lightness, helped by the staccato playing at the outset, with rhythmic buoyancy from soloist and orchestra, and that informs the idiomatic arrangement of the last movement of the K333 Piano Sonata, with the composer’s own cadenza, paradoxically drawing the most Mozartean of the performances on the album. Martin Cotton