This is another fine issue in the series that Andras Schiff, Sandor Vegh and their Salzburg orchestra have been giving us in a totally unhur- ried way over a period which, as I have been astonished to realize on checking, amounts to five years. Collectors familiar with the performances, or these columns, will know that the artists offer us playing which has been called ''civilized'', ''urbane'', ''old fashioned'', even, but always ''alive to the inner vitality of the music''. I ventured my own list of their qualities in a recent review of their two discs of the Concertos Nos. 22-5 (Decca (CD) 425 791/855-2DH, 7/91), so will not do so again, but merely say that the playing here is thoroughly stylish and that the soloist, conductor and hand-picked orchestra work as one.
This is not Mozart playing of the kind that makes one exclaim ''how thrilling!'' or ''how ravishing!'' at this or that moment, and this is principally why Schiff differs from Friedrich Gulda and Mitsuko Uchida in their couplings of the same two works (respectively for DG Galleria and Philips). With Abbado and the Vienna Philharmonic, Gulda (who was recorded in 1975 and comes at mid-price) is vivid and incisive, putting the music across more positively than Schiff. It has been said of Uchida's performance with Jeffrey Tate and the English Chamber Orchestra that ''with her, every note matters'': if I suggest that with Schiff it doesn't, that is not meant negatively and in fact I prefer his seemingly less conscious delivery of the music. His musicianship is effortless, and if he does not woo the listener he pays us the greater compliment in assuming that we do not need to be wooed.
Schiff plays K467 first and gives us his own well-shaped and not overlong cadenza in the first movement. The over-exposed 'Elvira Madigan' Andante can nowadays sound a bit of an old broad, but although Heinz Holliger's oboe here is a trifle pungent, the playing has the right balance of sensuousness and chastity. Similarly, the finale is vivacious but not loud. Of all Mozart's piano concertos, K466 is most obviously the one of 'storm and stress', and I had reservations about these artists in the other minor-key work in the series, K491, when I reviewed the above mentioned discs, thinking the performance understated. However, here the playing, while restrained, still has the proper tension, although brooding mystery is the keynote of the first movement, one of smouldering fires rather than firecrackers (try the recapitulation in the first movement at 7'48'' for an example of this). I didn't think that Beethoven's cadenza would work ideally with this approach, but as Schiff plays it, it does. The agitated middle section of the Romance is well integrated into the rest and the finale has some real storming, though from the orchestra rather than the pianist. The recording is warm but not too reverberant, as some earlier ones in the series were, and thanks to Schiff's finesse his Bosendorfer sounds right for the music.'