Mozart: Piano Concertos 22 & 27

With these two Mozart piano concertos, Alfred Brendel comes full circle. Gone are the days of pounding out Beethoven's "Hammerklavier"--back trouble has seen to that--and the late Schubert sonatas are now, after their triumphant release in early 2001, safely on their way. Brendel has now gone back to the expressive simplicity of Mozart's own farewell. The 27th concerto, Mozart's last for the piano, was written after three years of abject, mendicant poverty, yet to listen to its radiant finale here--played as though there wasn't a cloud in the sky--you'd never credit such a desperate provenance. In these new recordings, Brendel's lifelong pursuit of an orchestral richness of tone is beautifully vindicated: the woodwind colors Charles Mackerras extracts from his players find their perfect pianistic echo here. And when, in the second movement of K. 482, the strings come across in funereal darkness, Brendel has an appropriate answer for that, too. Pellucid without a trace of preciousness, these performances are in every respect flawless, and Brendel's own cadenzas manage to tickle the ear without disrupting the nobility of Mozart's dialogue. --Michael Church