All three of these players offer a particularly good performance of the E flat Concerto, K449, a work which often seems to inspire something special from Mozart pianists, as no doubt it did in 1784 from its first interpreter, Barbara Ployer. Mozart would hardly have composed another concerto for her within a few months (the G major, K453) had she disappointed him. Written for a small orchestra, with ad libitum wind parts— oboes and horns only—there's every reason to couple it, as all these records do, with a work from the set of three Mozart composed the year before for himself to play (K413, K414 and K415), since these too were originally designated as concertos performable without the wind instruments, even as piano quintets. Christian Zacharias on EMI couples K449 with K414 in A major, as does Perahia on CBS, who also offers a third work, the F major K413. The CBS therefore has a claim to represent the best value for money, even though the booklet is reach-me-down and no itemized track is allocated to the finale of K449.
Uchida is at her best in K449, in all of it, and the easy way she modulates and inflects her playing gives it a personal air which I find attractive. One wants concerto soloists to sound personal, of course, but it's perhaps not overfanciful to find in what Uchida does here a reflection of the remarkable pianist for whom the piece was composed. Babette Ployer must have possessed a strong musical personality, after all, not just a pretty face and good fingers, for the concerto to be written the way it is. Ardent, urgent, tender, witty, ingenious, high-spirited: some of these epithets will doubtless seem more appropriate than others. They hardly begin to do justice to all the qualities of the music, of course. But it's perhaps not fatuous to see them as having something to do with Mozart's talented pupil, and to acknowledge what in particular it is that a gifted woman as soloist can bring to our enjoyment of this piece. Here and in the G major Concerto, and also in the earlier E flat Concerto, K271, written for Mademoiselle Jeunehomme, there is surely justification for regarding Mozart as the first equal opportunities instrumental composer! Women's rights activists need not write to me, please!
I would, however, be glad to know if Mozart's autograph of K449 has turned up again since it was last heard of in Berlin. Can we now know for certain if bars 319 and 320 (as numbered in Redlich's edition of the score for Eulenburg) of the first movement are indeed two bars, or should they be conflated? This is at the point where the piano, having built a passage of brilliance comparable to the one which closed the solo exposition earlier on, steers the cadential trill away from the expected key, E flat major, to C minor. The orchestra burst in forte, in the new key, and it is a startling moment. But where exactly should the orchestra burst in? After the trill, or under it in the bar before? Scores at present: Uchida and Zacharias 2 (under the trill); Perahia 1 (after). Not, I feel, an arcane textual matter. Mozart is Mozart and one would like to know what he wrote.
All three pianists make us feel the force of the marking for this movement, allegro vivace. Uchida's urgency I find delightful because it is unforced and so well in place. Zacharias (with Maksymiuk and a tightly directed Polish Chamber Orchestra) by contrast is crisper and a shade impersonal; his first movement has lots of zip but sometimes not quite enough allure (which is perhaps the conductor's fault more than his). In the finale, all three versions are respectful of the requirement for the pace to be not too fast and two in a bar; Perahia is a little quicker than the others. On the EMI, the second fiddles of Maksymiuk's orchestra play a corrupt text in bar 126. And the recorded sound? I would place the new Philips first. The balance and quality are lovely.
Knowing of Uchida's penchant for taking lots of time over pauses and connecting flourishes, it could have been predicted that she would hold up the action the longest before the finale of the K449 Concerto breaks into 6/8 near the end. Well, no matter. In the finale of the C major, K415, however, with its rather schematic and sectional structure, her mooning little cadenzas, far from bridging gaps and articulating the unusual form, simply hold up the flow. At each one she sits down and then goes on a little wander. In that respect I think her performance badly misconceived, and you have only to listen to Perahia for a few minutes to realize how the movement should hang together. With him it is a connected sequence of events; with her, stop-go. As to elaborations, she even fills in the pause-bars in the two orchestral tuttis just before the interpolations of the adagio music in C minor—places where a pianist today would normally not dare to tread. It's possible that Mozart himself at the piano might have dramatically interrupted the orchestra here, but how difficult it is when improvizing such gestures to find something with which to convince the listener that this is exactly what he would have done. Uchida is a bold and enterprising Mozartian, and I like her for that, but I can't help wondering if there aren't times when she would do better to hold back.
There are times too when I just think she's on the wrong track, unaware of what is fit and what is not. The elongated pauses and indecisive musings in the second movement cadenza prompt me to hold this up as another example. Hold it up—the music—she certainly does. I wish she wouldn't. Her series of the Mozart concertos with the excellent ECO and Jeffrey Tate is proving to be full of good things, but I do regret the irrelevancies.'