Search - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Adrian Boult, Malcolm Sargent :: Schnabel Plays Mozart

Immortal Mozart

G Pelloni | Cottingham, East Yorkshire United Kingdom | 02/02/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Though Schnabel is often known as "the man who invented Beethoven", thanks to the US music critic Harold Schonberg, he was also the pianist to whom (together with Eduard Erdman) we owe the "discovery" of Schubert's piano music and the development of a modern approach to Mozart. This development was achieved by Schnabel, together with his contemporaries Edwin Fischer and Wilhem Backhaus and in the wake of Ferruccio Busoni. These pianists, taking different routes, went beyond a strictly Biedermeier or drawing room view of Mozart, still alive in a pianist like Gieseking (though suffused with an unsentimental melancholia) and expose Mozart's more dramatic (at times tragic) dimension. They opened the way to Petri,Horszowski, Serkin, Arrau, Lipatti, Gulda, Perahia, Schiff,...In these recordings, we have Schnabel at his very best: his capacity of maintaining a close relationship between different level of sonority, his ability of shortening or lengthening silences, his sensitive rubato, his purling legato.

Any consideration of style (authenticist or not authenticist) can be fortunately abandoned. Here we have pure musicianship showing the futility of such debates over styles. Here we have the music of Mozart, through the eyes of a magical pianist at its most profound and human level.

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