A Night With Friedrich Gulda

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Friedrich Gulda, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Genre:

Instrumental

Label: Arthaus Musik

Media Format: Digital Versatile Disc

Media Runtime: 85

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: 101 674

101 674. A Night With Friedrich Gulda

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Sonata for Piano No. 6 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Composer
Friedrich Gulda, Composer
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Composer
Sonata for Piano No. 12 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Composer
Friedrich Gulda, Composer
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Composer
Sonata for Piano No. 18 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Composer
Friedrich Gulda, Composer
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Composer
Fantasia Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Composer
Friedrich Gulda, Composer
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Composer
With his crazy Nelson Mandela shirt, purple shades and head cap of many colours, Friedrich Gulda looks every bit the dude. When this concert was recorded at the Munich Klaviersommer in 1995 the polymath Austrian pianist was already 65 years old; but the range of material he offered to that Munich audience, and the surefooted way he moves from authoritative performances of Mozart to equally in-the-pocket performances of funk-based jazz and, to end, a head-banging 20 minute techno set suggests a man whose body aged independently of his mind.

The atmosphere is glitzy Las Vegas ballroom. The audience are gagging for a good time and Gulda is received rapturously. So bright are the spotlights that they blur against the film and I feared at first that the recorded sound might be equally tinny and unresponsive. But watched through headphones on my MacBook the sound has remarkable clarity and definition.

Gulda’s Mozart – perhaps not surprisingly – has a lilt and a swing that is aided and abetted by a clean-cut, almost Baroque sensibility that holds Romanticism in disdain. When he begins the finale of K576 he counts himself in and arches his back like a jazzman finding his groove. And although it’s tempting to comment more on the juxtaposition of styles than the musical material itself, let no one doubt that this is top-drawer Mozart-playing – the Adagio of K332 s(w)ings with the grace of scat singing, and I like the way Gulda suddenly lurches towards the minor without any rubato or preparation.

And then party time! The Paradise Trio (featuring the excellent Hammond organist Barbara Dennerlein) played authentic fusion jazz, backbeats care of drummer Jojo Mayer. Gulda’s solo on Dennerlein’s ‘Give it up’ – a tune derived from Lee Morgan’s ‘The Sidewinder’ – takes a line for a walk on the wild side before grappling with Brubeckian block chords. Gulda launches the techno set and then dances around the stage like a version of his own younger self. All that’s left – and this is not very politically correct, I know – is for Gulda to introduce his dancing girls, who gyrate and twerk around his keyboard. This night with Friedrich Gulda wasn’t over yet.

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