Though printed in four languages, the accompanying booklet includes no information about the music. Instead, its slender space goes to an all-too-platitudinous tribute to Justus Frantz, together with a few words from Frantz himself to explain his approach to this composer. As he summarizes it in the last sentence: ''My goal is to play the music of Mozart as the music of a vital and lively musician, and not as the music of a 'plaster cherub'.''
In that he certainly succeeds. It is uncommonly forthright, masculine Mozart, strongly rhythmical at all times, and marked by extremely bold accentuation and dynamic contrast (he admits to feeling that the sf and fp markings in Mozart too often ''fall victim to a soft interplay''). This is brought home the more sharply by comparison with Uchida (Philips) in the two sonatas, and not least in the opening Variations of the first in A major. Within the extra minute and a half (or almost) that she allows herself we're given phrasing of a rather more tender and intimately inflected kind. The same is true of the Adagio of the F major work. Though their timing is practically identical here, again Frantz opts for a more sharply cut contour. Both finales, and especially the Turkish march of the former, are projected with enormous panache. But I think I would find Uchida's less assertive, more fancifully imaginative vitality easier to live with. There is just a trace of the 'mechanicus' in Frantz's brio (though not, I must hasten to add, in the first movement of the F major Sonata, where he is much more the yielding artist I remember of old in Schubert's duets with Eschenbach).
To the Duport Variations he brings a welcome incisiveness, clarity and briskness, here the two slow numbers are all the more affecting for his purity of style. And I enormously enjoyed his appreciation of the droll, musical-box charm of his final quasi 'encore', presented here as ''Das Butterbrot''. What a pity the booklet doesn't enlighten us about its origin. The recording is full, forward and warm.'