During my studies at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and with the aid of the manuscripts available there, I was able to submerge very deeply into a fascinating world. The autographs of Mozart’s works were always particularly appealing to me, especially as the recently printed editions still contain deviations from the handwritten manuscript. A manuscript often tells a story, e.g. in the B flat major Sonata KV 454. Mozart only put the violin part to paper and in concert accompanied the violinist by heart. After the concert, he sat down to the work once more and wrote the piano part at the bottom, although there was hardly room for it on the paper. If he had not done this, the sonata would only have been performed once. In the meantime, as a musician interpreting Mozart you have to heed many subtleties to do justice to the composer’s acoustic ideal and phrasing wishes. I find it particularly important to concern myself with the harmonic structure of the works and the changed interpretation by performing on modern instruments. Mozart composed most of his works from the piano – an indication that his Legato and linking arches should be understood in very pianistic terms. What is dangerous is that, despite heeding all these structural nuances, the spirit of emerging ‘musical sensibility’ gets lost, i.e. the works are only examined for stressed and unstressed tempi, false ‘fortes’ and misplaced ‘sforzati’ and the living component of the music disappears. For me, Mozart’s chamber music always has something very operatic about it, and we have written our own libretto to each of these sonatas. At the beginning of the F major Sonata, for instance, we hear people running around excitedly behind the opera stage before the beginning of the performance and, in parallel, we hear singers rehearsing without interruption. With the abrupt end of the movement, the curtain opens and an aria is first introduced by the piano and then sung by the violin … In my pianist Robin Green, I have found somebody who is successful both on the piano and as a conductor and who thus paid special attention to taking sufficient account of the operatic features of Mozart’s chamber music in our recording. It was our aim to make a recording focusing on dialogue, a dialogue between us musicians and a dialogue with Mozart. We allowed ourselves to be guided by his hints and this way found our own language for his music.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 20:00:25 +0000
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