Austrian pianist Gottlieb Wallisch titles this collection of Mozart piano music "A Tale of Two Cities," a promising idea inasmuch as Mozart's music reflected his changes of residence in both general and specific ways. The trouble is that none of the music here was actually composed in Paris; the two piano sonatas at the center of the program actually originated not in either of the titular cities but in Salzburg. Wallisch is a strict pianist in the extreme, never deviating from the beat or from a fairly restricted dynamic ...
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Austrian pianist Gottlieb Wallisch titles this collection of Mozart piano music "A Tale of Two Cities," a promising idea inasmuch as Mozart's music reflected his changes of residence in both general and specific ways. The trouble is that none of the music here was actually composed in Paris; the two piano sonatas at the center of the program actually originated not in either of the titular cities but in Salzburg. Wallisch is a strict pianist in the extreme, never deviating from the beat or from a fairly restricted dynamic ambitus. If you like this kind of thing you'll find Wallisch a skilled technician, but most listeners will find the Adagio in B minor, K. 540, by all appearances a genuinely anguished work, on the dry side. Wallisch's most individual contribution is a sort of rolled execution of note-preceding ornaments, a questionable decision in that it was just this kind of lightly agile sound that pianos of Mozart's period could not produce. The chief attraction here is the presence of some very...
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