Yet another Mozart sonata cycle! Katin, we're told, has had the project in mind for some time. These are the first two of a five-disc set in which he is rejecting chronology in favour of programmes that contain either ''a balance of the earlier and later works, or an arrangement of the sonatas intended to show as much contrast as possible''. For text, he has made his own choice from all three most recent, often conflicting, Urtext editions. As for the sound itself, what we're given in Vol. 1 is light, clear and gleaming.
Katin's own sound-world is a constant delight in its tonal refinement and textural translucency—so is his fleetness of finger and his finesse in every detail of phrasing and ornamentation. The Mozart we meet from him here is eminently civilized in expression, or should I say very much the composer once described by Menuhin as able to resolve his emotions on a level that transformed them into moods ''uncontaminated by mortal anguish''. In the C minor Sonata's faster flanking movements I would nevertheless have preferred sharper reminders of underlying disquiet—such as we get from Uchida on Philips (amongst others) with her considerably more urgent tempo. Even the C minor Fantasia, finely moulded and unified as it is, lacks a measure of inner intensity and mystery. But the Adagio of the Sonata has a calm, Elysian beauty all its own. In the A major Sonata I enjoyed Katin's seductive sonority and lilt in the opening movement as much as his vitality and bite in the Turkish finale. Uchida only scores here with her slightly statelier Minuet. And even if the C major Sonata's concluding Allegretto is marginally too fast for every innuendo to tell, Katin certainly reveals the work as (in his own words) ''probably one of Mozart's finest portrayals of unclouded mood''.
Initially the second volume made me wonder if I'd over-estimated Norway's Ski Church Hall. Here, I had the impression of closer microphones and a resonance causing faster figuration to emerge less clear-cut than before. Or maybe it was just because Haebler's Vol. 4 arrived at the same time, and that close comparison of the two artists in the ''little sonata in C for beginners'' revealed her recording as the more crystalline (reviewed above). Opting for variety rather than chronology, Katin chooses this late sonatina to preface the dramatically challenging earlier A minor Sonata and two of its roughly contemporaneous middle-period companions. His bold tone and firm rhythm certainly remind us that Mozart qualifies his allegro in the opening movement of the A minor work with the word maestoso. But his response to the finale's presto is surely too deliberate to convey the movement's full, urgent disquiet.
Throughout the second disc I felt in the presence of someone more anxious to assuage, by emphasizing the music's ordered calm, than to startle. To call his approach classical would nevertheless not be correct: his phrasing in slow movements is too tenderly yielding for that. Now and again he might perhaps prove just a little too urbane for some tastes, such as when shrinking from minor key intensity in the course of the Adagio of the F major Sonata (track 8, 3'05'' et seq.) or even from those surprise contrasts of dynamics and touch in the main theme of the benign Andante con espressione of the D major Sonata. I personally would also have liked stronger dynamic contrasts as well as a livelier tempo in the flanking movements of both these works. Yet if characterization is never carried to its ne plus ultra, it remains playing of disarming simplicity and truth, with the composer's emotions as it were recollected in tranquillity.'