South African-born keyboardist Kristian Bezuidenhout seems to search for a middle ground between those who treat the fortepiano as a kind of modified harpsichord and those who stress the ways its percussive potential can highlight the incipient Romantic qualities in music of the late 18th century. On this collection of Mozart piano works, he makes full use of the potential of his instrument, a copy by American-Czech builder Paul McNulty of an 1802 Viennese instrument by Anton Walter, often deploying the pedals to develop a ...
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South African-born keyboardist Kristian Bezuidenhout seems to search for a middle ground between those who treat the fortepiano as a kind of modified harpsichord and those who stress the ways its percussive potential can highlight the incipient Romantic qualities in music of the late 18th century. On this collection of Mozart piano works, he makes full use of the potential of his instrument, a copy by American-Czech builder Paul McNulty of an 1802 Viennese instrument by Anton Walter, often deploying the pedals to develop a range of sounds that take on added color from the unequal-temperament tuning. Yet his basic mode of playing is not terribly expressive. The combination works well in the muscular works that bookend the album, with the lower ranges of the McNulty fortepiano bringing out the full Beethovenian power of the Piano Sonata in C minor, K. 457 (played, unusually, without its introductory Fantasia in C minor, K. 475), and of the rather symphonic Piano Sonata in C major, K. 330. The smaller...
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