Mozart in minor (Konstanze Eickhorst, piano)

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The booklet for this German release contains an elegant short essay by Wolfgang Sandberger exploring the concept of melancholy in the 18th century, and containing the amusing fact that in a popular novel by Johann Martin Miller published in 1776, someone cries more than 550 times. The idea of bringing together minor-key works by Mozart (there aren't that many of them) for keyboard is a good one, for melancholy is a quality often ascribed to him, and it's productive to juxtapose works in which he explicitly tried to be melancholy. These works look both forward and backward. The Piano Sonata in C minor, K. 457, presented here with the associated Fantasia for piano in C minor, K. 475, are among Mozart's most Beethovenian works, and the ones that influenced Beethoven the most, and the level of chromaticism is daring throughout the program. Yet Mozart was also dealing with old conventions for expressing melancholy, conventions that dated back to the Renaissance but underwent gradual change over time. It's a fascinating little collection, and the only stumbling block for many listeners will be the general lack of melancholy in the playing of German pedagogue Konstanze Eickhorst, which tends toward extreme precision rather than expressive space. Maybe it's conducive to listening dispassionately to this aspect of Mozart's language; maybe it's excessively cool. It may, in fact, depend on your own hopes and purposes. The sound, recorded in a concert hall at the Musikhochschule of Lübeck, is nicely calibrated to the performance: it's dry, sparse, and detailed.
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