The cycle of Mozart piano sonatas given in London's Wigmore Hall a year or or so ago by Mitsuko Uchida has already acquired almost legendary status, and the hopes those recitals raised are amply fulfilled in this record from Philips, the first of seven that will embrace all Mozart's sonatas and major piano pieces.
The whole of the first side is devoted to the familiar Sonata in A, K331, now thought to have been composed between 1781 and 1783, in Munich or Vienna, and not in 1788 in Paris as was formerly believed. The eloquence and subtlety of her playing, her feeling for dynamic colouring and her immaculate sense of rhythm and tempo, are at once apparent in the set of leisurely variations which make up the first movement, and which can rarely have sounded so lovely as they do here; and she completely avoids the rattling vacuity so often suggested in performances of the final Rondo alla Turca. She is equally persuasive in the contemporaneous Sonata in F, K332, whose two fast movements display a rare blend of drama and lyricism. The Andante which separates them exists in two versions, that of the autograph and that of the first edition, printed in Vienna by Artaria in 1784 and presumably supervised by the composer. The implication is that Mozart himself varied the already florid nature of the keyboard style in different performances: so Uchida intelligently makes use of both versions, as well as adding a few variants of her own. An even more inspired innovation, apparently suggested at the recording session by the producer Erik Smith, illuminates her account of the Fantasia in D minor, K397 (1782, or possibly 1786-7). Mozart left it incomplete, and printed editions incorporate a rather perfunctory and unsatisfactory ten-bar 'coda'; instead of this Uchida goes back to the sombre music of the opening Andante, adapting it to form an infinitely more fitting conclusion to the piece.
This is playing of great distinction, beautifully recorded; what further treasures must be in store!'