Mozart: Complete Clavier Works, Vol. 10

German historical keyboard specialist Siegbert Rampe has been releasing a complete cycle of Mozart's keyboard works on the German audiophile label MDG. They are, in contemporary parlance, pretty hardcore. They not only include oddities like fragments and music by the six- or seven-year-old Mozart, but they also attempt to imagine fairly specifically the instruments on which the pieces would have been performed. Rampe sometimes uses a clavichord, which is almost never done elsewhere even though Mozart demonstrably owned one ... Read More

German historical keyboard specialist Siegbert Rampe has been releasing a complete cycle of Mozart's keyboard works on the German audiophile label MDG. They are, in contemporary parlance, pretty hardcore. They not only include oddities like fragments and music by the six- or seven-year-old Mozart, but they also attempt to imagine fairly specifically the instruments on which the pieces would have been performed. Rampe sometimes uses a clavichord, which is almost never done elsewhere even though Mozart demonstrably owned one for much of his life and used it for private music-making. The oddball instrument here is the 1771 harpsichord by Swiss-English builder Burkat Shudi, on loan from a museum in Glarus, Switzerland. It includes a pedal-actuated device called a "Venetian swell," which allowed the player to obtain graduated dynamic effects. Rampe uses this instrument to great effect for a fragment of a variation set, but also for the Keyboard Sonata in G major, K. 11, which Mozart composed in 1764 while... Read Less