The not infrequent pairing of these works on LP and CD - which makes sense since they belong to the group of three concertos which include clarinets, Mozart's favourite wind instrument - has given us some of the most distinguished Mozart concerto recordings over the years. Those by Wilhelm Kempff (dating from 1960), with Ferdinand Leitner and the Bamberg SO, and Clifford Curzon (1968), with Istvan Kertesz and the LSO, are still in the catalogue; more recently the versions by Mikhail Pletnev (1991), much admired by me but perhaps on the individual side for some, have joined them. I have no doubt these new ones by Richard Goode are among the best and should join the short list.
The Kempff and Curzon are classic 'big band' accounts which are nevertheless successful in suggesting the intimacy of the A major Concerto as well as the grandeur of the C minor; and although the soloists are upfront you feel the varying weight of the contributions of wind, strings and piano is held in convincing balance in both works. With Pletnev an outstanding conductor as well as pianist, the benefits of keyboard-led performance - he directs the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie - are immediately apparent: the soloist's relationship to the orchestra is closer and subtler, as is theirs to him. These pieces are not chamber music but their discourse often suggests a closeness of collaboration which is chamber-like, with the players matching and listening to each other as musicians in a co-operative venture.
The new Nonesuch disc seems to me an amazing achievement in this respect. Richard Goode is not a conductor and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, a workers' co-op based in New York, does not work with conductors. This is the third Mozart CD they have made (previous ones have been reviewed in 4/97 and 10/98, with another one to come), and it could go without saying that collaborations of this kind, requiring a lot of rehearsal time, must necessarily be rare. The demands this sort of music-making imposes on the players are considerable. But so are the potential rewards. They are evident here in the exceptional focus and concentration of the playing. Polished you might expect it to be, but the allure and spontaneity are a joy. First impressions are likely to be of details of scoring in the orchestral expositions of the first movements, details that may not go unnoticed in other performances but which rarely receive such voicing and definition. Sample the opening of the C minor Concerto (track 4) and it seems to me you hear the dialogues of the wind as soloists, and the matching of different pairs of wind instruments, achieving a heightened eloquence: flute and first bassoon in imitation, two octaves apart, answered by solo oboe and solo clarinet, for example; then, as this long exposition (100 bars) draws to a close, various pairings of all the woodwind. And when Mozart colours the string texture by dividing the violas in two parts, you hear that too. Well, such things are there to be heard, not to be annotated, but I mention them because the C minor has the largest orchestra he ever wrote for in the concertos and it is lovely to have the richness of it given such attention.
The pianist does not disappoint either. Judge him by his first entry in this concerto, in the solo theme: there is none more difficult to get right, and you will, I think, continue in the feeling that Goode has the range, the control and the rhetoric and all shall be well. He passes another difficult test in this first movement by supplying an impressive cadenza (in the absence of one by Mozart), suitably dramatic and functional in the sense of being of the right length and weight; I like, too, its little quote from another piece of Mozart in C minor. After that, imitative pairs of oboes and bassoons are telling against the piano's figuration in the coda. And there you have it: an outstanding account of this movement, to be returned to again and again. There is no falling off in the other two. I admire in particular the way the variations of the finale are presented as all of a piece, without changes of tempo. There is flexibility, and they have all the time they need, but Goode lets some of his part run on, convincingly, at points where other pianists usually do the opposite, and the span of the movement, down to the change to 6/8 before the final variations and coda, is all the better for it.
In both works, the bigger scheme of things is in place as well as the detail. How do these people do it, I wonder? Long-range continuity and form building seem to me to have been admirably looked after, with each movement emerging as an entity - characterised, purposeful, unique. So does each concerto. The A major, K488, equally well illuminated, has light and air from a different world. There is indeed an airborne quality to the finale, done here with the utmost vivacity, and a hint of that too in the open textures and the easy, glorious buoyancy of the first movement. Goode decorates the theme a little in the slow movement at its return in bar 53 but leaves the arching lines at the end, over the pizzicato accompaniment, unadorned; I am glad of that, but if you subscribe to the new orthodoxy of decorating everything in the solo part of these concertos you will find him plain. He fills out those bars in the C minor which Mozart left in shorthand, naturally.
Maybe the way of performing these works exemplified here will one day become another orthodoxy? I doubt it, but if it does I shall be happy! What I like is not just the freshness but an extra dimension to the vitality which has resulted from the fact that the current flowing through has been the responsibility of everybody, not just the soloist's. As with the great interpretations of the past, we are given an object lesson in what the music can yield when an attempt is made to realise as many aspects of it as possible. The recorded sound is exemplary. Max Wilcox was the producer and credit is due to him too.'