Pianist
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet
, following on his recordings of
Haydn
, has achieved a similar mix of critical and popular success with his
Mozart
concerto recordings, which here reach their tenth volume. The album landed on classical best-seller lists in the autumn of 2024. These works were written by
when he was 11, and they were in the vein of exercises set out for the young composer by his father,
Leopold
. Each movement of the four concertos, except possibly for the Andante of the
Piano Concerto No. 1 in F major, K. 37
, was based on a keyboard sonata movement by another composer; the keyboard parts are left alone, and
had to furnish orchestral parts so that he might master the growing Classical concerto form.
mixed models by multiple composers in the same work. This might seem an unambitious subject for a recording, but
Bavouzet
gets the very most out of it. Except for
C.P.E. Bach
, the composers of the models --
Hermann Friedrich Raupach
,
Leontzi Honauer
Johann Schobert
, and
Johann Gottfried Eckhart
-- are not well known in the least, and they have rarely been mentioned in lists of
's stylistic ancestors. However,
and veteran conductor
Gábor Takács-Nagy
, leading the
Manchester Camerata
, find what is Mozartian about these pieces. Consider, for example, the Andante from the
Piano Concerto No. 3 in D major, K. 40
, with its highly characteristic repetition of lyrical cadential phrases. Also intriguing is the Andante of the
Piano Concerto No. 1
, indicated in the tracklist to be "after a work by an unknown composer"; no model for it has been found, but the notes suggest that it could be an original
work, and the gravity with which
invests it backs up this contention well. The album is nowhere less than intriguing, and it makes an elegant coda to
's
series. ~ James Manheim