Bach / Mozart / Britten: Concertos – Martin James Bartlett

Three works for piano and orchestra – by Bach, Mozart and Britten – make up the programme for the latest album from Martin James Bartlett. His Warner Classics release Rhapsody was welcomed by BBC Music Magazine as “a joyful display, full of warmth, character and the singing tone that Bartlett has come to be known for”, while Gramophone lauded “an outstanding keyboard talent at the top of his game”.

Recorded in Salzburg with the city’s Mozarteumorchester and the British-Swiss conductor Howard Griffiths, Bartlett performs Bach’s Keyboard Concerto No 1 in D minor, Mozart’s ‘Jeunehomme’ Piano Concerto and Britten’s Young Apollo, which is scored for piano, string quartet and string orchestra.

“When I began shaping this album, I started with Benjamin Britten,” explains Bartlett. “He was a brilliant pianist, remarkable for his purity of intention, clarity of touch, and emotional honesty … When programming his own Aldeburgh Festival, Britten would often give the works of Bach and Mozart special attention. He also showed his deep admiration in the way he allowed them to influence his own compositions.” Bartlett describes Young Apollo, premiered in Toronto in August 1939, as “a brilliant, rhythmically electric work suffused with the kind of radiance that would become one of Britten’s hallmarks”.

Britten mysteriously withdrew the piece shortly after its second performance (in New York, also in 1939), and it was not revived until after his death. As Bartlett points out, “For this recording, I worked from a new critical edition that corrects numerous errors and omissions in earlier scores, which means that this performance represents, in a sense, a second world premiere.”

He sees Mozart’s ‘Jeunehomme’ concerto as “a natural counterpart to Young Apollo. Both are works of youth, written by composers in their early twenties … Both burst forth with precocious confidence … It was a privilege to record Mozart’s concerto in Salzburg, the city of his youth and the place where I performed the work in a masterclass with Sir András Schiff. That experience proved momentous in my musical development.”