The European usage of the word "pianoforte" on the cover of this disc will be confusing for some listeners; heard here is the instrument usually known in English as the fortepiano, the piano of Mozart's own time. Belgian performer
Jos van Immerseel showcases a modern copy of a fortepiano built by J.A. Stein of Augsburg, an instrument builder Mozart specifically praised. This recording was made in 1980, when the fortepiano was mostly the province of university music departments, but it remains a good starting place for anyone interested in the question of what historically informed performances can bring to Mozart's music.
Immerseel was one of the first fortepianists to grasp that the instrument, far from constraining Mozart, actually allowed greater expressivity in performing him -- if the instrument does not have the dynamic range of a modern piano, its more nimble action makes possible sudden contrasts in texture, of a sort that would be hard to execute on a modern grand.
Immerseel's instrument gets a workout in Mozart's two most grandly Beethovenian piano works, the Fantasia in C minor, K. 475, and the closely associated Piano Sonata in C minor, K. 475.
Immerseel's treatment of the sudden transitions in these works is at times nothing short of Lisztian -- hear the approach to the second section in the Adagio movement of the sonatas -- but it never sounds at all unidiomatic. The gloomy Fantasia in D minor, K. 397, and Rondo in A minor, K. 511, are likewise intense. But perhaps the most vivid demonstration of
Immerseel's powers comes in a work usually assigned to the lighter side of Mozart's output: the Variations on "Ah, vour dirai-je, Maman," K. 265, using the tune known in English as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."
Immerseel's reading is as thoroughly worked out as any performance on disc of one of Mozart's smaller variation sets, conveying something of the surprise a listener of Mozart's day might have felt when encountering the varied textures of the fortepiano for the first time. Booklet text by
Immerseel himself, with extensive discussion of both the music and the instrument used, is given in English, French, and German.