Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos 18 & 22 – Brautigam

   in Piano International (Sep, 2014)
One reason why Mozart’s piano concertos of the mid-1780s sound so beguiling has to do with his daring deployments of flute, oboe, bassoon and clarinet, or what Robert Levin has called his ’emancipation of the winds’ and their subsequent ‘transformation of the orchestral texture’. The three concertos on these discs offer striking examples, from K456’s opening Allegro vivace, where Mozart takes the interplay between winds and strings through an ‘astonishing variety of combinations’ (John Irving’s words, from his essay for the Brautigam CD), to K491’s Larghetto, whose numerous wind solos led one critic to designate it a ‘sublimated serenade’.

K482 is the apogee of this expressive coloration, especially in the richly …