Christian Zacharias, Orchestre de Chambre de Lausann - Mozart : Piano Concertos Vol 7 (2011) [SACD]

Christian Zacharias is both soloist & conductor in this successful series. His partnership with MDG has yielded outstanding productions in every respect. He has won 2 Echo Klassic Prizes & has been selected as Artist of the Year by international music critics. He & his ensemble communicate all the vibrancy of this music. Piano Concertos: Nos. 6, 13, 16
This is Volume 7 in what is apparently going to be a complete set of the Mozart piano concertos by Christian Zacharias. I asked to review it because I was so impressed by his performances of the 5 Beethoven concertos with Armin Jordan conducting (Cascavelle 3118), in which Zacharias’s enlivened inflections of phrase & rhythmic acuity were combined with original & highly imaginative cadenzas that acted within the concertos like mini-fantasias.
I am not at all disappointed by his solo playing here, which is crisp yet lighter in tone than his Beethoven, which is wholly appropriate for Mozart. The problem, to me, is his conducting & the overall performance & sound quality of the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra. Its playing is “soft” both in phrasing & attack, coming across almost as background or elevator music. This was the kind of Mozart sound in vogue during the late 1970s & early ’80s, before the historically informed crowd moved in to show us that such earlier conductors as Toscanini, Furtwängler, Doráti, & Markevitch had it right, that unlike Haydn, whose music sounds good at a slightly relaxed pace & with a wide dynamic range, Mozart tends toward sameness & boredom when given that approach. Mozart needs to be performed with a combination of emotional commitment & sharply etched contours, as in the performances of Harnoncourt, Norrington, Pinnock, & others. In the case of the piano concertos, one can scarcely imagine or achieve finer performances than those of the entire series recorded by fortepianist Jos van Immerseel & Anima Eterna on Canal Grande 8016.
Of course, there are listeners who are much in favor of this particular style of Mozart performance. I myself was 1 of them in the early 1980s, when I became a fan of Murray Perahia’s then-groundbreaking series of Mozart concertos. For them, then, this disc & its 6 other counterparts, issued so far, will make quite satisfying listening. The hybrid Mch sound is warm & round, which again de-emphasizes the music’s edge.