This disc is a reissue of recordings made ten years
ago and fitfully available since that time. Roberte Mamou recorded the
complete Mozart piano sonatas on five CDs, and these are now in the
catalogue once again. Their return is to be welcomed, since the performances
are stylistically sensitive and the recordings generally natural and
clear.
Mamou plays a modern instrument rather than a fortepiano,
but the insert notes tell us precious little about the circumstances
of the recording. The same is true of the music, alas, which describes
the background and music of all five sonatas within three short paragraphs.
The notes we have are rather good, in fact, offering several useful
insights in a fluently written style. There just needs to be more substance
than this.
The Tunisian-born pianist Roberte Mamou is based in
Europe, and has worked mostly in Belgium. She has just the right manner
for this repertoire, always seeming to choose an appropriate tempo and
to phrase with care for the musical line and the thematic personality.
When these things feel as spontaneous and natural as they do here, the
performer can take due credit. For these sonatas have their demands.
One of my favourite anecdotes concerns the great Hungarian pianist Andor
Foldes, who made his debut playing Mozart at the age of only six. After
he was fifty he stopped playing many Mozart pieces on the grounds that
they were 'too difficult'.
These sonatas were written in Salzburg in 1774, when
Mozart was eighteen. Perhaps he intended to perform them in Munich,
when he went there for the premiere of his opera La Finta giardiniera.
In their under-stated way these pieces do take the player through his
or her paces. All five have a three-movement design, but the approach
changes from one piece to the next and any sense of formula is avoided.
The Sonata in C major, K279, the first in the series,
is perhaps the least successful of these performances, since the faster
outer movements seem somewhat unyielding. The recorded sound exaggerates
this tendency, with little atmosphere and a dead acoustic.
Fortunately this is the exception rather than the rule,
and much of the remainder of the programme is a good deal better in
every way. The recorded sound is at its best in the atmospheric performance
of the G major Sonata, K283, which musically gives us an advance over
the style found previously. Try, for example, the very opening (track
13: 0.00), with its appealing principal theme; this is typical of the
best features of the performances. Then the finale is a virtuoso movement
at tempo Presto, which shows the dexterity of the playing to excellent
effect.
Terry Barfoot
see review Volume
2
NOTE •
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Roberte Mamou (piano) 
