Mozart: Piano Concertos No. 15 & 16

   in Piano International (Jul, 2015)
This is one of the more uneven discs in Ronald Brautigam’s consistently inconsistent series of Mozart piano concertos. It opens with a splendid performance of K451’s majestic Allegro assai, all flair and flamboyance; but for much of the remainder of the disc Brautigam sounds curiously disengaged, and at times seems to hurry the music along as if impatient for it to end. This happens in the two Andantes, where he shows little inclination to linger over the tender nuances of touch that would help the music’s inherent poetry to take shape. He even dashes through K450’s popular hunting rondo, in marked contrast to the skipping tempo and sense of fun that …