If you want a nice, polished, civilized performance of Mozart's late sonatas for piano and violin, don't buy this CD. These, like the earlier Mozart issues from Chiara Banchini and Temenuschka Vesselinova (5/94), are vivid, adventurous readings, which take nothing for granted and say a lot of new things about familiar music, often in a very exciting way. Nowhere more so than at the beginning of K454, with its very slow and grandly performed introduction: a startlingly dramatic opening, which Mozart could well have intended (it was after all written to catch the ear of the emperor, when Mozart was giving a concert with a visiting virtuosa). The generous rubato in the secondary theme may surprise the listener, too, endowing the music as it does with quite different meanings. In the Andante the expressive articulation of the principal theme and the impeccable timing of the detail—a delightful sense of the players perfectly capturing the logic of the music—helps give rise to an extraordinarily intense reading, the finale is no less individual with its precise timing and placing of accents and many a phrase interpreted in novel fashion—and the triplets and semiquavers of the dosing bars emerge as a sudden but wholly natural outburst of high spirits.
K526 is equally daring and equally persuasive. I particularly liked the large-scale architecture, so forcefully conveyed, in the finale, which is passionate and yet still has a sense of fun. In the first movement there is some very brilliant dialogue between the instruments, as well as eloquence from the violin in the lyrical music and much resourceful management of dynamic detail. In K547, however, they are less successful, trying, it seems, to impose on a slender work (''A little sonata for beginners'', Mozart called it) an intensity that it cannot support—listen for example to the overstated drama of the middle movement or the exaggerated expression in the minore variation of the finale. Better to take this piece at its modest face value. Still, this CD ends these two artists' remarkable Mozart series with performances, yet again, of distinction originality and real vision.'