Bohm, Pollini: Mozart – Piano Concertos no.23,19 (APE)

Composer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Performer: Maurizio Pollini
Orchestra: Wiener Philharmoniker
Conductor: Karl Bohm
Audio CD
SPARS Code: A-D
Number of Discs: 1
Format: APE (image+cue)
Label: Deutsche Grammophon
Size: 218 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes

Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K 488
01. I Allegro
02. II Adagio
03. III Allegro assai

Piano Concerto No. 19 in F major, K 459
04. I Allegro vivace
05. II Allegretto
06. III Allegro assai

DG’s first recording of Pollini’s Mozart.

Certainly, Pollini has been DG’s exclusive pianist for decades.
If you measure an artist’s success with his discographic output, you’d think that Pollini must be on odds with Mozart.
That really is quite far away from the truth, since there is quite an amount of ‘bootleg’ live recordings of Pollini’s Mozart in the earlier stages of his performance career, and DG had just recorded a couple of Mozart’s piano concerti with Pollini in the 1970’s until he returned for 4 more in the early 21st century.
Pollini is actually quite a versatile pianist judging from the range of his repertoire. There has been plenty of senseless rantings against his modern music discography, especially that Pollini associated himself with leftist composer and musician Luigi Nono during the latter’s life time.
There are some pianists who develops a personal style so strong that whichever composer he/she plays, he/she remains the same.
Rarely so with Pollini. His Mozart is a great testament that he never sacrifices a composer’s style for his own. These two performances were also video-taped and released on DVD. You can clearly see that the conductor, Karl Boehm, who was a great Mozartian in his lifetime, virtually ‘handed over’ the music to Pollini at the Keyboard, and that ‘history’ has it that it was Pollini who specifically singled out Mr Boehm for his two Mozart concerti’s recording.
So much so for the background, and really this pair worked like honey and milk in these performances: serene, mellifluous and exceedingly beautiful.
There is a clear other-worldliness in Pollini’s Mozart in these recordings that one seldom finds in other pianists, however famous, save perhaps the great Clara Haskil.
Pollini and Boehm virtually ’emptied’ themselves for Mozart’s music to gain full control.
If you wish to find out the truth about Mozart’s music, look for this one for a starting clue.