As in their earlier set, of Mozart's Paris and Mannheim sonatas for keyboard and violin (5/94), Temenuschka Vesselinova and Chiara Banchini offer performances of intense conviction, informed by some very interesting and original musical insights. The first six of these seven sonatas are the group Mozart published shortly after he settled in Vienna; they are supplemented by a later work (not, curiously, his next sonata but the one after). Take the first sonata here, K376: the opening movement is treated not as a lively and showy piece but rather as a pensive one, with little touches of passing rubato (the kind Mozart favoured, time borrowed and repaid rather than actually stolen) to illuminate the shape or the meaning of a phrase or to add point to the instrumental dialogue. In the Andante too the selective and musicianly use of small-scale rhythmic inflexion is extraordinarily telling, heightening many moments and lending much extra expressive weight to the whole; and the finale is done duly gracefully, with proper significance assigned to its chromatic harmonies and its contrasts of texture. I felt I was hearing much of it afresh.
And so it continues. In the K296 first movement these players make lively and witty sense of the dactylic accompanying figure, which so often sounds awkward, and in the second they beautifully catch the vein of sentiment. There is a splendidly exuberant reading of the opening movement of K377, with many happy details of shaping, and the variation movement, with the breadth of their view of its structure, becomes much more than merely decorative. They seem—I remarked on this in the previous set—to have a special feeling for Mozart's variation movements and a capacity to bring to them a real cumulative sense rather than being content to read them as a series of ornamental episodes. The lyrical K378 Sonata is done at a consistently high level of intensity and it comes out much grander and more serious than I have ever heard it before, with plenty of Sturm und Drang in their almost improvisatory account of the Andantino. K378 is anyway an extraordinary piece, and Vesselinova and Banchini make the most of the powerful rhetoric of its opening Adagio, while the G minor Allegro has tremendous fire and the finale, another set of variations, is again powerfully characterized and drawn together. The last of the set, K380, is in its way more classical in its invention, and they play its first movement in a suitably spacious manner, although there is no want of passion in the G minor slow movement. K481, a later work, is done in a more carefully poised manner, with some subtle details of timing; I liked the breadth and urgency of the first-movement development, the tender violin playing in the eloquent Adagio, the scaling and the brilliance of the variation finale.
This is a risky way of playing, and there are one or two places where you might fault the ensemble or find some small technical detail awry; but clearly Vesselinova and Banchini truly think the music together, and the result is a quite exceptional pair of discs. The latest Classical Catalogue shows no other recording of these sonatas on period instruments, as far as I am aware, which seems to me surprising as the balance between piano and violin simply doesn't work on modern ones. It works perfectly here; and with such performances as these, quite out of the ordinary as regards musical insight, I can only say that these sonatas emerge as even finer works than I have always thought they were. I hope many readers will try them.'