The Cleveland Orchestra, Garrick Ohlsson & Franz Welser-Möst - Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 27 & Symphony No. 29 (2025)

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The Cleveland Orchestra, Garrick Ohlsson & Franz Welser-Möst - Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 27 & Symphony No. 29 (2025)

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Mozart died barely 11 months after completing his final piano concerto, No. 27, in January 1791. It’s one of the composer’s most serene concertos, full of wit and beauty, with a piano part that eschews technical difficulty for songlike elegance. Whether, as has been suggested over the years, the piece contains hints of a man resigned to his fate, doesn’t matter. Mozart was at the height of his inventive powers, and the piece is treated here to a performance of lightness and grace by a team of musicians determined never to overstate and risk romanticizing Mozart’s sublime utterings. Even when Mozart veers into minor-key territory, the storm clouds dissipate almost as soon as they gather. Franz Welser-Möst is a master at navigating these mood changes, coaxing exquisite subtleties of phrasing from his Cleveland forces, both stepping aside for and complementing Garrick Ohlsson’s honest playing, itself devoid of histrionics.

The second-movement “Larghetto,” one of Mozart’s most perfect creations with its childlike melody and sighing motifs that hint at something deeper, benefits the most from this excellent teamwork. Composed some 16 years earlier, Symphony No. 29 is from the pen of a 19-year-old Mozart. It’s the work of an already fully-fledged genius with its masterful use of orchestral color, mature dramatic arc, and harmonic and melodic invention, all presented with a beguiling freshness. The finale already has hallmarks of the energy that Mozart would inject into his late “Jupiter” Symphony. The Cleveland Orchestra seems to understand this in spades with playing that reveals every facet of Mozart’s brilliance with pleasing lucidity.

“Ohlsson’s virtuosity here isn’t speed or extremes of technique but rather exceptional clarity. Even where the composer turns playful, as in the third movement, the pianist retains his stunning equanimity, allowing not so much as a single measure to sound muddy or hurried.”