Jean-Efflam Bavouzet - Mozart: Piano Concertos, Vol. 4 (2019) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

This third volume in the series from the electrifying combination of Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and Manchester Camerata under Gabor Takacs-Nagy explores the final two of the six piano concertos of the year 1784, on which Mozart staked his reputation as both a performer and composer. Alongside these works features the pioneering Quintet for Piano and Winds, also from 1784, the first written for this combination of instruments and a work which Mozart regarded as his finest to date. The consecutive Kochel numbers of the three piano works hint at a remarkable story: not only were they all written in the same extraordinarily productive year, but all were completed in the same month, March, when Mozart was just twenty-eight years old. The two concertos form a pair, and in letters to his father Mozart makes it clear that he wrote them for his own performance: Nobody but I owns these new concertos in B flat and D, adding in another letter, two weeks later, I consider them both to be concertos which make one sweat. Heard in this context, Bavouzets playing is all the more astonishing.

"The Manchester Camerata under Gábor Takács-Nagy deliver blisteringly energetic articulation…Bavouzet and Takács-Nagy relish Mozart’s wicked touches of humour…[in the Quintet] once again, Bavouzet, working in a stimulating partnership with the orchestral principals, produces an elegant account that more than holds its own with many of the formidable recordings in the current catalogue." (BBC Music Magazine)

"Bavouzet and the Mancunians under Takács-Nagy find an ideal balance between the light-hearted and the serious in these wide-ranging pieces…The conjunction of soloist, band and Chandos’s characteristically fine engineering continue as they set out two years ago and conspires in a fascinating portent of what these players might do in due course with the later, larger, deeper concertos." (Gramophone Magazine)

"…his scintillating performance masks any discomfiture. The star of the show, however, is the Quintet in E-flat, the orchestral accompaniment stripped away to oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon, a masterpiece of Classical poise and balance. If the pianist is primus inter pares, each of the wind players has their share of the sunlight and the soloists from the Manchester Camerata… relish every note. The full band is on fine form in the concertos, well marshalled by Gábor Takács-Nagy. Excellent sound." (International Piano)

"Two of the six concertos from the miraculous year 1784 have been reduced to obscurity by the familiar enchantments of the other four, so it’s good to relish them here, performed splendidly by Bavouzet and Takacs-Nagy’s lively Manchester players." (Sunday Times)

Tracklist:
1. Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467: I. Allegro maestoso (14:37)
2. Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467: II. Andante (06:40)
3. Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467: III. Allegro vivace assai (06:48)
4. Don Giovanni, K. 527: Overture (05:54)
5. Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K. 466: I. Allegro (14:26)
6. Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K. 466: II. Romance (08:58)
7. Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K. 466: III. Allegro assai (07:42)

Personnel:
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, piano
Manchester Camerata
Gábor Takács-Nagy, conductor