Valerie Tryon & Peter Donohoe - Mozart: Piano Concertos, K. 242, 365, 466 (2018) [Hi-Res]

Mozarts progress from child prodigy to mature brilliance, from innocent insight to inspired innovation, is measured out in his piano music. Somms survey of six works for one, two and three pianos brilliantly charts both his phenomenal development and his far-reaching transformation of the concerto form. Two of todays finest, most accomplished and admired pianists Valerie Tryon and Peter Donohoe bring unrivalled experience to bear in impeccable, incisive and illuminating accounts of the solo and duo works. The young, fast-rising Mishka Rushdie Momen joins them for the discretely dazzling Piano Concerto No.7 for three pianos. Three other concertos are featured. Composed for Mozarts sister, Nannerl, the two-piano No.10 is a playful but challenging exercise in sibling rivalry. A favorite of Beethovens, No.20 is marked by a dark-hued drama and broiling emotional turbulence banished by its surprise sunny ending. Famously, it prompted Haydn to tell Mozarts father, Your son is the greatest composer whom I know in person or by reputation. The Piano Concerto No.21 is distinguished by its melodic directness, guileless wit and the balletic interaction between piano and orchestra, its meltingly lyrical Andante popularised by its use in the 1967 film Elvira Madigan and American pop star Neil Diamonds 1972 chart hit, Song Sung Blue. Echoing the galant style of the Seventh Piano Concerto, the ebullient, lyrical and bright Sonata for Two Pianos in D pulls and pushes the focus between the two instruments in music of delightfully genial resourcefulness. Composed a year later, the Fantasia in C minor for solo piano boasts a cornucopia of mesmerising effects as it spins the piano line into altogether idiomatic flights of dark-toned fantasy richly realised by Valerie Tryon.