I've been listening to the LP and I shall be curious to see if my impressions are modified when the CD is available to me. The high quality of the performances is not in doubt. On LP however they're presented with a balance of sound so idiosyncratic as to leave me puzzled. Sample, I suggest, the first movement exposition of the G major Concerto. Was this, I wonder, the kind of balance Schiff and Vegh agreed on, with the piano so remote and the wind so prominent? Well, since it's not absolutely consistent throughout the concertos, I doubt it. Yet let us assume for a moment that it was intentional. If so, some interesting points are raised. Could it be claimed, for instance, that this kind of balance is a closer approximation in the weights of piano sound relative to orchestral sound to what Mozart would have expected? Is the remoteness and reduced 'presence' of the piano in the picture a justifiable attempt to restrain the power of the modern instrument (in this instance, a Bosendorfer) and to capture a scale of sound which might be historically more appropriate? I wonder. In my own listening I find myself adjusting fairly readily to different pictures of recorded sound when performances are of interest. Here, however, I have some difficulties.
One accepts, of course, that there are many passages in these works where it's appropriate for the pianist to relinquish the line of the music to another part of the orchestra—to contribute to the texture without dominating it, to accompany an orchestral soloist, to play as if in chamber music, even to be masked for a moment or two by the orchestra. In the subtlety of the relationships between piano and orchestra lies the richness and fascination of the mozart concertos. So in the first movement of the G major it doesn't bother me that piano figurations are sometimes obscured by the lines of the wind. What does bother me are the times when the wind in a non-solo role obscure a statement by the piano, forcing it into the background, detracting from the force of it. The horns especially are guilty of this, but it is the chorus of wind as a whole which is over-prominent—and the imbalance is accentuated in the recording by a particular richness of sound in the middle of the range. With all the wind players credited on the sleeve—and Aurele Nicolet, Heinz Holliger and klaus Thunemann among them—it's a little as if they are being specially featured.
In general I find a more satisfying balance in the B flat Concerto. Yet there Schiff still appears to be quite far away, making contributions as if from some lofty perspective, removed from the throng. One of the effects of distance is to make the dynamic range of his playing narrower than we would otherwise perceive it. I miss the immediacy of a full-blooded forte in his brilliant passages, and in the exchanges with the orchestra in the G minor slow movement I just want more of him—presence as well as quiet eloquence. Then, again, in the solo following the first orchestral tutti in the finale you can tell the balance still isn't right because the piano's dialogue with the orchestra doesn't make full effect. You sense the soloist is disadvantaged in some way. In the course of the record I reflected more than once that a less interesting player than Schiff would have failed to make much effect at all.
Schiff makes you listen, and the ease with which he communicates his delight in the music is compelling in itself. His first entry in the G major Concerto is not characteristic: the way he makes his left hand accompany the right in a high-stepping non legato strikes me as affected and unconvincing. You may also find the tempo of his last movement on the staid side for a two-in-a-bar allegretto. The playing, however, is full of character and makes a good case for this moderation, if you believe that the sequence of variations should unfold without tempo changes. I like his reading of the B flat Concerto without reservation.
With Sandor Vegh in charge, the Mozarteum orchestra, recorded on home ground, has never sounded better: and I doubt whether the orchestral aspect of these concertos has ever been better characterized. The trouble, for me, is that they don't always sound like piano concertos. But I will reserve further judgement until the CD arrives.'