Aldo Ciccolini - Mozart - Alla Turca (2011) Hi-Res

Over the course of his 60-year career Aldo Ciccolini has established an intimate relationship with the great composers. Now aged 85, he takes a fresh look at one of the greatest and says "I understand Mozart now". For this recording Aldo Ciccolini plunged into the past, to his earliest years: he says that with the Bechstein he rediscovers "the sound of my childhood" and that this new energy does justice to the impetuous spirit of an untamed genius. Although he has played and replayed these three sonatas for so many years, they suddenly rise to new heights, borne of a deep relationship between the two masters. It took Mozart 17 years to write these sonatas; it took Ciccolini 85 to transcend them: "I have these three sonatas in me from my soul to my fingertips," he says.
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.