MusicWeb International One of the most grown-up review sites around 2024
60,000 reviews
... and still writing ...

Search MusicWeb Here Acte Prealable Polish CDs
 

Presto Music CD retailer
 
Founder: Len Mullenger                                    Editor in Chief:John Quinn             


CD REVIEW

Some items
to consider

new MWI
Current reviews

old MWI
pre-2023 reviews

paid for
advertisements

Acte Prealable Polish recordings

Forgotten Recordings
Forgotten Recordings
All Forgotten Records Reviews

TROUBADISC
Troubadisc Weinberg- TROCD01450

All Troubadisc reviews


FOGHORN Classics

Alexandra-Quartet
Brahms String Quartets

All Foghorn Reviews


All HDTT reviews


Songs to Harp from
the Old and New World


all Nimbus reviews



all tudor reviews


Follow us on Twitter


Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Editor in Chief
John Quinn
Contributing Editor
Ralph Moore
Webmaster
   David Barker
Postmaster
Jonathan Woolf
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger

alternatively
Crotchet

 

Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART (1756-1791)
Piano Sonatas (complete) (c.1775-1789)
CD 1
No.1 in C major KV279 [11:59]; No.2 in F major KV280 [11:11]; No.3 in B flat major KV281 [13:25]; No.4 in E flat major KV282 [12:16]; No.5 in G major KV283 10:08]
CD 2
No.6 in D major [25:14]; No.7 in C major KV309 [18:38]; No.9 in A minor KV310 [14:46]; Rondo in D major KV485 [4:59]
CD 3
No.8 in D major KV311 [15:48]; No.10 in C major KV330 [15:19]; No.11 in A major KV331 [25:27]; Rondo in A minor KV511 [9:36]
CD 4
No.12 in F major KV332 [16:25]; No.13 in B flat major KV333 [19:08]; Fantasia in C minor KV475 [11:50]; Sonata No.14 in C minor KV457 [18:33]
CD 5
No 15 in F major KV533 [20:11]; No.16 in C major KV545 [9:07]; No.17 in B flat major KV570 15:20]; No.18 in D major KV576 [15:59]; Fantasia in D minor KV397 [5:58]
Maria-Joćo Pires (piano)
rec. Lino Hall, Tokyo, January – February 1974
BRILLIANT CLASSICS 92733/1-5 [5 CDs: 59:09 + 63:37 + 66:10 + 65:56 + 66:35]

 

Experience Classicsonline


Comparison
: Maria-Joćo Pires, Deutsche Grammophon 4775200; rec. Hamburg 1989-93

If you need proof that Wolfgang Amadeus gathered notes that fell from Heaven look beyond his Church music to these instrumental works. There is no shortage of Mozart’s piano sonatas on CD but there is only one Maria-Joćo Pires; or rather, there are two.

In 1990, as DG began to release its cycle, Denon (Nippon Columbia) re-issued these 1974 recordings at a budget price, long deleted until now. Whereas DG is very expensive, Brilliant Classics publish these five CDs at super-budget price level yet the presentation, box, and booklet are top quality.

Maria-Joćo was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1944. It is a remarkable thing that genius often blossoms in a person’s thirtieth year. The Denon and DG series are separated by years during which digital technology improved immensely and by a gap in her career which I know only as the illness of the artist. Reading the DG biography it seems her musical life began when she was signed by them; however, in the early seventies Erato, a label with impeccable taste and a great back-catalogue now in the Warner group, recorded her. For me her Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart sonatas and concertos are “personal”, sublime, pure, exalted, naļve. As she once said in a master-class, the score is not the music; meaning, I believe, that if it were then it would be best played by a computer. In my home an international pianist who heard her Bach on an out-of-print CD became quite determined to acquire a copy or deprive me of mine.

Pires belongs to the elite whose technique is sufficiently brilliant to become irrelevant: her choices of tempi, phrasing, dynamics, are determined by her unerring instinct; and that is a good phrase to define her artistry. She is no metrical time-beater; for her the score is nothing more than the clues to the composer’s sound. This is not the imposition of her own will - quite the contrary, unless you believe that these composers were limited to unemotional “metrical” constraints. This “mathematical formula” view is arguably most applicable, if at all, to Bach; until you hear her play Bach. Therefore, in my estimation, she is one of the greatest pianists of all time and a one-off. She plays with more than mind, but with body and soul. She is arguably at her best with people, which means concertos rather than sonatas and concerts rather than studio recordings.

OK, so I peeked at The Gramophone review of the 1974 Denon recordings on their 1990 reissue and it said almost the opposite of what follows here. It shows just how subjective music reviewing is, unless, as I believe, one of us must be absolutely wrong. In that case music reviewing is not so much subjective, but unreliable. If I am wrong, you waste £15; if I am right you escape briefly from the madness of the world.

It appears, to my surprise, that Brilliant Classics have not re-mastered the recordings. They sound exactly the same as the Denon CDs. Nippon Columbia made these PCM recordings almost a full decade before Sony/Philips launched CD yet they suffer none of the thin hard sound that audiophiles condemned in the first Sony/Philips DDD recordings ten years later. Testing the theory that today’s Hi-Fi CD players have solved the problem proved partially correct but played on an old CD player I had to hand, the 1990 Denon discs sounded good. To my surprise, after fifteen years of digital progress, the DG did not win points for superior sound engineering.

Now to the essence of this critique: the performance of the music. Pires’s view of the piano sonatas has not changed radically but for Denon there is an innocence that perfectly reflects the music. If you want more dynamics, phrasing, and such artistic virtuosity consider DG, because arguably her technique has matured but I do not like it. Try a lollipop, the famous Sonata No.11 in A major “Alla Turca”. Whilst the later recordings dazzle the mind these originals melt the heart. Even if the huge price advantage were reversed I would still choose this “fresh reissue”. It is more quintessentially Mozart and more Pires.

Jack Lawson


 


Advertising on
Musicweb


Donate and keep us afloat

 

New Releases

Naxos Classical
All Naxos reviews

Chandos recordings
All Chandos reviews

Hyperion recordings
All Hyperion reviews

Foghorn recordings
All Foghorn reviews

Troubadisc recordings
All Troubadisc reviews



all Bridge reviews


all cpo reviews

Divine Art recordings
Click to see New Releases
Get 10% off using code musicweb10
All Divine Art reviews


All Eloquence reviews

Lyrita recordings
All Lyrita Reviews

 

Wyastone New Releases
Obtain 10% discount

Subscribe to our free weekly review listing

 

 


EXPLORE MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL

Making a Donation to MusicWeb

Writing CD reviews for MWI

About MWI
Who we are, where we have come from and how we do it.

Site Map

How to find a review

How to find articles on MusicWeb
Listed in date order

Review Indexes
   By Label
      Select a label and all reviews are listed in Catalogue order
   By Masterwork
            Links from composer names (eg Sibelius) are to resource pages with links to the review indexes for the individual works as well as other resources.

Themed Review pages

Jazz reviews

 

Discographies
   Composer
      Composer surveys
   National
      Unique to MusicWeb -
a comprehensive listing of all LP and CD recordings of given works
.
Prepared by Michael Herman

The Collector’s Guide to Gramophone Company Record Labels 1898 - 1925
Howard Friedman

Book Reviews

Complete Books
We have a number of out of print complete books on-line

Interviews
With Composers, Conductors, Singers, Instumentalists and others
Includes those on the Seen and Heard site

Nostalgia

Nostalgia CD reviews

Records Of The Year
Each reviewer is given the opportunity to select the best of the releases

Monthly Best Buys
Recordings of the Month and Bargains of the Month

Comment
Arthur Butterworth Writes

An occasional column

Phil Scowcroft's Garlands
British Light Music articles

Classical blogs
A listing of Classical Music Blogs external to MusicWeb International

Reviewers Logs
What they have been listening to for pleasure

Announcements

 

Community
Bulletin Board

Give your opinions or seek answers

Reviewers
Past and present

Helpers invited!

Resources
How Did I Miss That?

Currently suspended but there are a lot there with sound clips


Composer Resources

British Composers

British Light Music Composers

Other composers

Film Music (Archive)
Film Music on the Web (Closed in December 2006)

Programme Notes
For concert organizers

External sites
British Music Society
The BBC Proms
Orchestra Sites
Recording Companies & Retailers
Online Music
Agents & Marketing
Publishers
Other links
Newsgroups
Web News sites etc

PotPourri
A pot-pourri of articles

MW Listening Room
MW Office

Advice to Windows Vista users  
Questionnaire    
Site History  
What they say about us
What we say about us!
Where to get help on the Internet
CD orders By Special Request
Graphics archive
Currency Converter
Dictionary
Magazines
Newsfeed  
Web Ring
Translation Service

Rules for potential reviewers :-)
Do Not Go Here!
April Fools




Return to Review Index

Untitled Document


Reviews from previous months
Join the mailing list and receive a hyperlinked weekly update on the discs reviewed. details
We welcome feedback on our reviews. Please use the Bulletin Board
Please paste in the first line of your comments the URL of the review to which you refer.