Here are two of the finest Mozart Violin Sonatas, played by two of the finest Mozart chamber musicians, expertly remastered so that the violin sound is practically indistinguishable from 1980s vintage, but recorded by someone with a nineteenth-century idea of the appropriate balance between the instruments.
Without a score who would guess that the line at the opening of K454 or the finale of K526 is in the piano rather than the violin? Yes, there are considerable compensations. The sheer personality of Clara Haskil's playing draws attention to the piano line even when the recorded balance does not favour it (and even when her own articulation is less than immaculate). Also Grumiaux is less self-consciously expressive in his accompanying role than in his recent complete set of the sonatas with Walter Klien (also on CDs but not available separately—Philips 412 141-2PH4, 11/85 and 3/86). Grumiaux in 1981 places his portamentos exactly as and where he did in 1956 (in itself a rather disturbing observation) but with less spontaneity and with the addition of a wider, tackier vibrato—how forced, even maudlin he sounds in the introduction to the B flat Sonata beside the marginally more restrained earlier recording.
Given the tubby piano sound, the bumpy edits, the occasional pedestrian passage in the piano (for instance, in the slow movement of the D major Sonata), it is difficult to give this reissue a wholehearted welcome. But at the moment it is not too easy to nominate anything significance preferable (see my November review of Grumiaux/Klien).'