Last September, just less than a year after his sensational London recital, the veteran American-born Russian violinist Oscar Shumsky, was feature—partnered by the Veteran Polish pianist Artur Balsam—in the first instalment of a projected complete recording of Mozart's music for piano and violin, made in the USA by the Musical Heritage Society and issued here by ASV. That record (ALH930, 9/83) was devoted to the five sonatas (K301-3, 305/293a-d and K296) that Mozart composed in Mannheim in the early months of 1778, the first four of which were included in the set of six that was published in Paris in November 1778 (with a dedication to the wife of Carl Theodor, Elector Palatine) as his Op. 1(!).
This second instalment includes the two remaining 'Op. 1' sonatas written in Paris in the summer of 1778: the elegiac K304/300c in E minor and the brilliant, extrovert K306/300l in D; and K378/317d in B flat, written either in Salzburg in 1779 or in Vienna early in 1781, an expansive, concerto-like work with a positively operatic slow movement that was included (together with K296 and four other sonatas also written in Vienna in the summer of 1781) in the set of six published by Artaria in November 1781 as Mozart's 'Op. 2'. It also includes a rarity in the shape of the Allegro in B flat, K372, the first movement of a sonata that Mozart began on March 24th, 1781, probably for Antonio Brunetti (his deputy and later successor as Konzertmeister in Salzburg) to play with him at a subscription concert in the Kartnertor Theatre on April 3rd. This he never completed because the Archbishop of Salzburg, at that time still technically Mozart's employer, forbade Mozart to give the concert. (In the event, the Archbishop relented, but a new sonata, probably K379/373a in G, was performed, virtually at sight, instead.) Mozart wrote out all but the last two bars of the exposition of K372, but fortunately the movement was quite convincingly completed by the Abbe Maximilian Stadler, in which form it was published in 1826.
As in Vol. 1, the playing of Shumsky and Balsam is of great distinction: authoritative, sensitive (but never sentimental, as the lovely E major Trio of K304's Minuet can often sound) and brilliant where the occasion demands, as in the first movement of K306 or the colourful rondo finale of K378. These vividly-recorded performances are well able to hold their own in a competitive field, and whet the appetite for further instalments.R1 '8402063'