Complete Piano Sonatas
Fantasia K.475
Elisabeth Leonskaja Piano
Warner Classics 0190296457821
6 CDs
The Review
We are lucky to have an extraordinary array of mature interpretors of Mozart (we’ll each have our own list) around at the moment and Leonskaja is as accomplished as any. There are some recordings which one knows from the first few phrases are going to be just right.
The listener can relax, knowing the music is in safe hands. Her accounts of the 18 Sonatas were all recorded in the Winter and early Spring of 2021 in Bremen’s Sendesaal and must have been a wonderful project to keep the mind off the grim COVID months. Now in her late seventies, she won an impressive list of prizes when she was in her early twenties before she managed to leave the Soviet Union and settle in Vienna in 1978.
Perhaps because the sessions were so concentrated, in one accoustic and on the same piano, the quality of the performances is wonderfully even. So too is the seriousness with which she treats each sonata, making no obvious differentiation between the works considered early and late – quite properly, since they are grouped within fifteen years, from 1774 – 88. Browsing through the set, that means that they can either be listened to in sequence or enjoyed by picking a CD at random. Leonskaja’s persuasive approach is the same – no gimics, precious little embellishment, and firm-fingered articulation. In this she is close in manner to relatively recent recordings by Peter Donohoe and Christian Blackshaw; perhaps more like Donohoe who similarly strikes the keys without trying for a particularly mellow sound.
Leonskaja is always thoughtful but never fussy. It is as if these are perfomances for private consumption rather than the grand spaces of the concert hall. They make me wonder if Mozart himself ever had the time and quiet in his chaotic households to play the sonatas through with such meditative clarity. Where the music demands projection, though, as in the more virtuosic and explosive C Minor Fantasia and Sonata No. 14, K.457, she is not afraid to underline the strength of the writing, giving it plenty of force, bringing out the sturm und drang elements when Mozart starts enjoying the full force he could achieve in chords on new pianos, compared with earlier instruments.
There is always room for a view of these sonatas that is not so matter-of-fact but Leonskaja’s is a survey that will wear very well with repeated playing.
SM