Artur Schnabel Plays Works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

On this CD:

1. Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466
Composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Performed by Artur Schnabel
Conducted by George Szell

2. Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, K. 453 Andante
Composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Performed by Artur Schnabel
Conducted by Fritz Stiedry

3. Piano Sonata in F major, K. 533/494
Composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Performed by Artur Schnabel

Customer Reviews:

Architecture with passion!.......2005-11-04

There is a remarkable aspect in Schnabel 's playing I must emphasize: nowadays almost no one plays likes of that way. You can find honorable exceptions here and there: Daniel Barenboim, Andras Schiff, Paul Badura Skoda among others but do not become enthusiastic too much, they are less than you can imagine; the most of pianists have a visible penchant to play the score musically. And this is a serious problem at the time you play the Great Composers and worse still at the moment the best of their repertoire. In the particular case of Mozart is quite evident still.

With the Piano Concerto No. 20, Mozart decided to cross the lobby to the tragic mood. It was not too frequent in Mozart (try for the Andante in the Ninth Concerto, for instance); Mozart makes a great leap to the cosmos and links directly with a mythical state of anima that requires from you as pianist all the possible and careful treatment. In the past times, besides playing a work you should think about the work; you had to pronounce and give every note the appropriate intonation: A Forte, mezzo forte or pianissimo own by themselves a distinctive profile and character. For artists of the stature of Benedetti Michelangeli, Myra Hess, Kempff, Busoni, Solomon or Egon petri this aspect was nothing new.

Being the Concerto No. 20 a true breakthrough by itself, the point of departure for the Great set of Concertos to come, possesses a special and very special atmosphere. The elusiveness and mystery are present from the first bar. D Minor does not it suggest you anything? Mozart variegates like any other composer, but the changes of modulation are quite notorious to ignore this fact. Even in the pleasing Final it would be too risky to affirm it 's a happy ending, it is the atmosphere that surrounds it, made to disturb the listener.

Schnabel played it with this conviction in mind and that is the apparent disconcert and disappointment you can experience if you have not listened carefully to Myra Hess, Barenboim or Edwin Fisher around this work. We have in the actual times a clear tendency to classify everything and separate into categories: text and intention, the spirit beneath the score is something you can not express it unless you feel it, I can learn you to think but not to feel.

The Concert No. 17 `s Andante is admirable and besides mysteriously, always looking and searching. Benedetti Michelangeli told once: " Today 's young musicians are afraid to think. They do everything in order not to think. Animals are better off. At least they possess instinct. Man has lost contact with himself. Before an artist can communicate anything, he must face himself. He must know who he is. Only he dare to make music!"

Come for this recording and you will note the sublime difference around the particular pianism of Artur Schnabel, a honest artist that many of their detractors may argue he was eccentric, but according the penchant in the actual state of things in which the singularity is gradually more and more struggled searching the homogeneity, is the equivalent to play with triviality trying to avoid the physical tensions. And how can you pretend to remark the grandiosity of an artwork playing it trivially? That was precisely what the Greeks designed when they talked about the cathartic experience: to beat the soul through the catastrophe, and that you will never get it playing kindly, avoiding the sonorous excess, killing surreptitiously the Dionysian side of the music.

Music Track:

Music Track

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