When an 85-year-old pianist says that Mozart helps him to live, you tend to sit up and take notice. Pianist Aldo Ciccolini further says that making these recordings of early Mozart sonatas, using a Bechstein piano, helped him rediscover the enthusiasm for Mozart he felt as an adolescent prior to World War II. And these are indeed unusual Mozart recordings. Asked in the interview-format booklet notes "Are we still in the Classicist spirit here or already in the in the Romantic?" he answered, "Most certainly Romantic!" That gives you the overall flavor of these readings, which feature free tempi, lots of pedal, and in some places (sample the opening movement of the Piano Sonata in A major, K. 331) luxuriant added decoration. These details are not consistently applied, and it's a bit hard to discern a consistent idea, but a pervading spirit of deep lyricism supplies an X factor that keeps you listening through periods such as the oddly abrupt finale of the Piano Sonata in F major, K. 280. Generally speaking, this is not only a trip back to Ciccolini's inward love of Mozart in his youth, but also to the way Mozart was played back then, as a kind of prelude to Beethoven and Schubert. Certainly a must-have for Ciccolini fans, and an intriguing find for anyone interested in the question of late-life creativity.
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