Mozart, Bach & Others: Piano Works

Album review

This new publication from the historic label APR dedicated to Wilhelm Backhaus is of undeniable musical and political interest. The first ever publication of the recordings that marked the end of the German pianist’s collaboration with HMW (His Master’s Voice) which started in 1908 and was brutally interrupted in 1948. The recordings took place in Switzerland, an escape and refuge for more or less active sympathisers of the Nazi regime, like Alfred Corto and Wilhelm Backhaus. The latter refused to return to London and demanded the pieces were recorded in his adoptive country.

Claiming that there were cutting problems on the masters upon their arrival in London, Walter Legge (the producer at the label HMW) never published these recordings, being neither satisfied with the pianist whose playing he found dry and heartless, nor the acoustics and the bad piano at the Zurich studio. The real reason clearly being the fact that Legge was not able to act as the artistic director for these recordings. Furious, Backhaus wrote a long letter to Legge putting a definitive end to their collaboration, the pianist then returned back to the “rival” label Decca, with whom he recorded his interpretations up until his death in 1969.

Among the chosen works by Bach (Italian Concerto, Prelude and Fugue in B flat major), Mozart (Sonata K. 331), Beethoven (Sonata no. 18) and Schubert (Impromptu in E flat major), one finds of Wilhelm Backhaus’ typical sobriety and virtuosity whose pared down playing is distinguished by its great polyphonic clarity. His interpretation of Mozart’s rather unpopular “Coronation”, his Concerto K. 537 was recorded in Berlin in November 1941 when the Third Reich controlled a Europe on its knees. While we know that Backhaus had played for the Führer in private, here we find him alongside Fritz Zaun, a supporter of the regime, for this homage to Mozart. Backhaus plays with his own cadences and never hesitates to ornament or embellish some of the chords that Mozart had left bare, a practice often used by Backhaus in line with the traditions of the time. © François Hudry/Qobuz