Several recordings of Mozart's piano concertos accompanied only by a string quartet (or quintet) have appeared lately; this group of six, recorded in 1988, was one of the first. They are "authentic" inasmuch as the arrangements are Mozart's own, although his justification for doing them was that if he didn't, someone else would. One suspects that they are appearing now for the same reason they did in Mozart's day -- not everybody can afford to support a full orchestra. Annotator Jeremy Siepmann makes the refreshing ...
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Several recordings of Mozart's piano concertos accompanied only by a string quartet (or quintet) have appeared lately; this group of six, recorded in 1988, was one of the first. They are "authentic" inasmuch as the arrangements are Mozart's own, although his justification for doing them was that if he didn't, someone else would. One suspects that they are appearing now for the same reason they did in Mozart's day -- not everybody can afford to support a full orchestra. Annotator Jeremy Siepmann makes the refreshing admission that "no one could actually argue that the present concertos are actually improved by their reduction," and the loss throughout of Mozart's gorgeous wind writing is amplified in the Piano Concerto No. 13 in C major, K. 415, which includes trumpets and drums in the orchestra and loses a whole range of martial associations in this version. All this said, this vigorous French set stands out from other available versions for those who, again quoting Siepmann, desire to become...
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