German historical-instrument specialist Siegbert Rampe has undertaken an ambitious complete cycle of Mozart's keyboard music on instruments that are appropriate not only to the late eighteenth century generally but to specific phases of Mozart's career. His set is somewhat esoteric but consistently interesting for the true Mozartian, who will often hear familiar pieces in entirely new ways. Rampe is part of a current effort to strip Romantic accretions away from Mozart, and this is all to the good. Consider his reading of the Rondo in A minor, K. 511, which is often given a miserably debilitated feeling thought to correspond with the doomed quality of Mozart's last years. This is dubious, of course -- Mozart, at least until the very last, wasn't planning on dying, and Rampe, playing a modern copy of a Stein fortepiano, convincingly transforms this harmonically absorbing little piece into a vigorous and just slightly melancholy rondo. Another highlight is the little-heard set of Variations for piano on "Ein Weib ist das herrlichste Ding," K. 614, Mozart's last completed keyboard composition. Rampe argues that it might have originated as an improvisation among a group of Mozart's Masonic friends that included the composers of the song (whose title means A Woman Is the Most Magnificent Thing), and he gives it a lusty, freewheeling performance. He also does well with the various pieces of Mozart juvenilia that are distributed across the discs of his set, playing two of them on the clavichord and managing almost to put us in the room as people realized they had a genius on their hands. All this said, several odd choices make this disc a less-desirable choice for buyers wanting to sample his series. The program opens with an Ouverture for keyboard, K. 399, a set of Baroque dances that originated as Mozart studied the works of Bach in the home of the Viennese music connoisseur Gottfried van Swieten. They're fascinating moments that show Mozart suddenly becoming aware of a musical language much different from the one he had grown up with, and initially producing breathless, rather overstuffed imitations of it. Rampe quotes van Swieten to the effect, however, that Mozart used a fortepiano during these sessions, which makes his own decision to play a harpsichord puzzling -- the music is too stiff and dense in this version. One attractive feature of Rampe's set is his occasional use of a clavichord, which is thought to be the keyboard instrument Mozart had at home for much of his life. In meandering, fantasy-like works it brings a truly mesmerizing quality to his music. But the Piano Sonata in E flat major, K. 282, a piece that was all about public display, makes a strange choice for clavichord performance. MDG's sound, as usual in this series, is exemplary.
© TiVo