There seems to me curiously little personality to be discerned in Yuri Egorov's Mozart playing. You could describe the performances as satisfactory so far as they go but they are undifferentiated in expression, bland. Egorov is on nodding terms with the orchestra but shows no interest in a closer working relationship, and that perhaps is indicative of the way he avoids making strong statements about any of this music. Tasteful restraint is everywhere, as if the commodity were to be prized, or at least regarded as specially appropriate to the classical masters. The result is to make even the D minor Concerto sound bloodless. The first movement is delivered as if it were a piece of continuous prose punctuated only by commas. Scales are the length of a bit of string; the soloist's left hand is inanimate; and when Mozart breaks the flow of his grandly expansive paragraphs the impression conveyed here is that his meaning at these places is pretty obscure and needs to be approached with special reserve: at the beginning of the development, for example, where the piano tries out his solo theme three times, in different keys; or in the cadenza, where a bridge has to be built to conduct the great mass of energy towards the close of the movement. In a considered interpretation you feel these moments to be important ones, not necessarily in the terms I've used but in some way as dramatic points in the telling of a story or the passage of a journey. With Egorov, nothing much happens. Not even the vistas of Beethoven's cadenza tempt him to lift up his eyes to the hills.
Twenty or 25 years ago a Mozart piano concerto record as polished and well made as this might have been welcomed. And indeed the playing is not bad. You may wonder why I appear to be taking so strongly against it. Some of the G major Concerto is quite nicely done in a gracious and decorative way; and Sawallisch and the Philharmonia certainly do their best to suggest the range of expression—in the slow movement, for instance—that the pianist is reluctant to explore. But the achievement, in both concertos, falls far short of the best versions on offer and I see no virtue in searching for words of faint praise. As a Mozart player Egorov is not yet in the same league as Brendel, Barenboim, Serkin, Pollini, Uchida, Perahia. Next time I meet him on records I hope it may be in something else.'