Most of Mozart's single piano pieces are the product of some special stimulus: they are not the daily bread of music-making, like the sonatas, but something rather more piquant. So a selection of this kind - three rondos, three fantasias, three dance-type pieces and an Adagio - is apt to seem emotionally a little exhausting, especially in performances as intense and highly wrought as these.
Christian Zacharias groups the pieces interestingly, starting with a D major-based section: the D minor Fantasia, the D major Rondo, the B minor Adagio and the D major Minuet, as if making a kind of free sonata of them. He omits the Allegretto portion of the Fantasia (on the grounds, it seems, that Mozart left it unfinished: the usual 10-bar completion is the work of a publisher - so we forgo some 40 bars of genuine Mozart), and leads directly from the Fantasia into the Rondo. This seems to me ill-advised, in that the missing Allegretto would have provided a much more effective release from the Fantasia's tensions than the Rondo, which is quite different in idiom; still, he plays the Fantasia very urgently and eloquently, with an appropriately improvisatory feeling. And the Rondo is given a taut and brilliant performance, with a keen awareness of the expressive significance of the harmony.
The B minor Adagio is one of Mozart's darkest, most inward pieces: written at a difficult moment in his life, it invites autobiographical interpretation with its sense of defeat and protest (and the major-key ending hardly rings true). Zacharias's sombre and subdued performance underlines such thoughts, and in the very chromatic K355 Minuet, too, his playing is dark and impassioned (the Kochel number is deceptive: the revised one is 576b). The little Gigue, another enigmatic and chromatic piece, is thrown off in virtuoso fashion. The C minor Fantasia, K396, is something of a rarity: a completion by Maximilian Stadler of a fragment that Mozart wrote for keyboard and violin, it has some characteristic and very intense music but Stadler's lengthy development section seems to me more like middle-period Beethoven than Mozart.
I can't, however, imagine a performance much more persuasive than this one; and in the authentic C minor Fantasia, too, Zacharias plays very beautifully, again with fire in the turbulent sections and with exquisite gentleness in the coolly reflective music such as the B flat episode. The little C minor Funeral March is played immediately after the Fantasia (of course, Mozart's evident original intention was to follow it with the C minor Sonata, K475). The K494 Rondo - more familiar in its revised version as finale of the K533 Sonata - is played in a rather more relaxed manner; in the A minor Rondo, K511, Zacharias beautifully captures the 'sentimental' tone and provides a performance of great delicacy and refinement, again drawing the full depth of expression from Mozart's harmonic subtleties.
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