Attempting to summarize early nineteenth-century romanticism (in the introduction to a booklet on Beethoven's middle-period string quartets) Dr Gerald Abraham, one of my most esteemed youthful mentors, wrote: ''a sonata or symphony or quartet was no longer a more or less objective piece of craftsmanship shot through only with so much emotion as must always be spilled inadvertently into his work by a craftsman of genius; it was a sublimated slice of the composer's emotional life''. I quote his only because I think it helps to explain Uchida's approach to the eighteenth-century Mozart, admired by the majority for its stylish classical purity, but now and again censored by others for its refusal to anticipate nineteenth-century subjectivity.
In this latest stage of her complete sonata cycle it was only in the Andante un poco adagio of the C major Sonata, K309, that I thought she was too clasically objective, mainly because of greater concern for the andante that the adagio of the heading, making decorative detail sound more active than expressive. For the most part, I admired her carefully held balance between Mozart the master-craftsman and Mozart the man. In the D major Sonata's Andante con espressione, for instance, how winningly she melts in that endearing little pendant at the end of its first section. And how boldly she conveys Mozart's defiance of fate in the opening Allegro maestoso of the A minor Sonata, K310, composed in Paris in 1778 around the time of his mother's illness and death. Her fingerwork per se, as ever, is faultless. Not for the first time I found myself engrossed by her left hand and its emphasis of thematic threads often overlooked. The recording is once again a happy equation of warmth and clarity.'