Search - Mozart, Curzon :: Piano Concerti

A thousand carats recording!

Hiram Gomez Pardo | Valencia, Venezuela | 11/24/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"There have been - along the history of the music - countless artists of the keyboard, but just a few deserve the epithet of poet-musicians. As a matter of fact, there were others not less remarkable too, like Wilhelm Kempff, Edwin Fischer, Myra Hess, Rosalyn Tureck, Samson Francois, Tatiana Nikolayeva, Sviatoslav Richter, Alfred Cortot or Benedetti Michelangeli. These artists always left aside the technique behind the personal expressiveness and that's why they were so easy recognizable. This aspect really worries me because in these modern times the expression simply seems to have been relegated to a second level for the most of pianists, induced perhaps for an Apollonian musical training, whose approach would seem to be: "Get the technique and then, search your own voice." Somehow this erroneous conception is producing a most homogeneous sound, lessening the personal expression. This is - to my mind - a real tragedy that progressively will annihilate the Dionysian nature of music.



For Clifford Curzon, Mozart's 27th Piano Concerto meant a true revelation, far beyond the simple musical frontiers. He - with the honoured exception of Robert Casadesus - immersed himself with meridian passion and devoted activity to decipher and feel this posthumous work, so filled of spring dreamlike, because having as musical partner the remarkable Benjamin Britten the final outcome is just right there, a mesmerizing performance of this seminal Kv.



As far as we know, with this piece Mozart gave another leap to the future (as we already have noticed in the second movement of the Ninth Piano Concerto, the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, the elusiveness of the First movement of the 20th Piano concerto, the sidereal charm of his Kv. 563 or the main theme of his Adagio in B minor) and realizing that Curzon was a prominent artist, absolutely committed with a superior level of interpretation we should not surprise ourselves he had achieved one of the most admirable historical registers (the other two would be Casadesus-Szell and Demus-Collegium Aureum).



So it's my most fervent desire that you try to get as soon as you can, this invaluable recording to preserve and remark the spirit of the sound.



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