Colin Tilney Plays Mozart, Vol. 5

Album review

Colin Tilney is best known as a harpsichordist with a wide-ranging repertoire stretching back to English virginal music. A versatile player, he has sometimes ventured forward into music for the fortepiano. Tilney generally does a splendid job of matching instruments and performance techniques with repertoire, and to a large extent that holds true for this disc of three Mozart piano sonatas, one of them with a well-established substitute finale added in place of a never-written original. His fortepiano, built in Seattle after a Classical-era model, is an agile instrument that sounds a bit like a harpsichord. As is often true of Baroque specialists, Tilney's readings of the early Sonata in C major, K. 279, and Sonata in D major, K. 284, are a bit on the dry side, more concerned with register and texture than with melodic grace. Still, Tilney can phrase a simple trill or passage of connective tissue in such a way that it really stands out, and the virtues of his approach come clear in his performance of the two-movement Sonata in F major, K. 533. This is a rarity -- an unfinished Mozart work -- and one can see why Mozart might not have had the time to finish it. It is a dense fusion of contrapuntal writing with galant style, not really like anything else in the Mozart canon, and both the fortepiano itself and Tilney's way of playing it bring out just how unusual it is. The opening movement of the sontata is nothing less than a keyboard counterpart to the finale of the Symphony No. 41, and the slow movement has an extremely unusual central contrapuntal section. The work performed here (as is usually done) with the Rondo in F major, K. 494, as a substitute finale. Its comparative neglect is perhaps due to its incomplete status, but it's well worth hearing, and Tilney provides an ideal introduction to it.
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