MOZART / Artur Schnabel plays W.A. MOZART

Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat major, K595  31:31

Artur Schnabel
London Symphony Orchestra
Sir John Barbirolli

Rondo in A minor, K511  9:41

Artur Schnabel

Concerto for 2 Pianos and Orchestra No. 10 in E flat, K365  24:01

Artur Schnabel, Karl Ulrich Schnabel
London Symphony Orchestra
Sir Adrian Boult

Recorded 02.05.1934 (1) 04.06.1946 (2) 28.10,1936 (3)

Label: Naxos Historical – 8.111294
Barcode: 0747313329427
Serie – Great Pianists – Schnabel
Format: CD
Country: Germany
Released: 2008
Genre: Classical
Style: Classical

“Often, when he played Mozart or Schubert, Artur Schnabel would be told that he made the music ‘greater than it is’…..That said, it needed someone to lift Mozart on to a pedestal alongside Bach and Beethoven, and, among pianists, Schnabel was as well equipped as anyone to do this”

Not long after his February 1934 London Queen’s Hall concert comprising three Mozart concertos, Schnabel made his first recording of a Mozart piano concerto, No. 27 in B flat major, K.595, at the recently opened and well equipped Abbey Road Studios. Completed in one session, this recording is notable not only for the excellence of its sound but for the moulding of the slow movement, taken at a slow tempo, but without any loss of the tension between successive notes or of the coherence of harmonic progressions. Schnabel’s recording of the Concerto for two pianos, with his son Karl Ulrich, is made up entirely of first takes. In the Rondo in A minor, K.511, Schnabel beautifully shapes the phrases and avoids sentimentality or overt intensity of expression.