Mozart: Piano Concertos K. 238 & 503

Album review

Fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout has provided clean, insightful performances of Mozart piano concertos in his ongoing series with the Freiburg Barockorchester, which he conducts from the keyboard. This 2023 release is no exception, and it hit classical best-seller charts in the autumn of that year. Bezuidenhout offers two works from about ten years apart, a sobering thought considering the vast dimensions of the Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K. 503. He opens with the Piano Concerto No. 6 in B flat major, K. 238, actually just Mozart's second essay in the form (those numbered one through four were arrangements and were still accomplished enough to pass for Mozart's own until the 20th century). It is a fizzy work, with some easy but virtuosic-sounding moves in the outer movements, that became popular when played by one of Mozart's students, and it was likely written originally for a harpsichord. As such, it is a bit overpowered by Bezuidenhout's copy of an 1805 Walter fortepiano. That doesn't apply, however, to the Piano Concerto No. 25, from 1787; the big Walter instrument was likely close to the sound ideal Mozart had in his head for the work. This is structurally Mozart's most ambitious concerto, filled less with his characteristic melodic genius than with big building blocks of rhythmically and texturally inflected pure harmony. It has never been one of Mozart's most popular concertos, requiring a pianist capable of a wide variety of keyboard attacks to keep its momentum up. This it receives with Bezuidenhout, whose performance would be persuasive even on modern instruments but is especially absorbing here. He grasps the work's complex architecture as well as any other pianist around, and the large palette of the Walter instrument serves him well. With fine sound from the Ensemblehaus Freiburg, this is a strong entry in Bezuidenhout's Mozart traversal.

© James Manheim /TiVo