The commentary in the booklet, while valiantly making special pleading for Edwin Fischer, admits that though he was undoubtedly ''a born musician, whether he was a born performer is another matter''. The plain fact is that, although possessing acute sensibility and considerable intellectual power, both his piano and his conducting techniques were insecure, and the stage fright and microphone nerves from which he suffered all his life often resulted in flawed performances. His good qualities are evident on these discs: graceful phrasing, great beauty of tone and sensitive nuances (even if somewhat romanticized for Mozart), liquid passage work (usually unpedalled, giving crystalline clarity), plus delicacy and purity. Against these have to be set missed or split notes, muffed ornaments and, worst of all, a seemingly fundamental instability of pace: again and again he allows his fingers to run away with him (e.g. at the triplets in the last movement of the K330 Sonata) and, both as pianist and conductor, he commits the elementary error of getting faster as the music gets louder. And not even his most fervent admirers would attempt to defend his wildly anachronistic cadenzas: it seems downright perverse of him, in the first movement of K453, to ignore the two that Mozart wrote and use an unstylish one of his own.
Fischer was one of the first pianists in modern times to conduct concertos from the keyboard: that this was not, in his case, a good idea is demonstrated by, for example, K453, where control of tempo is conspicuously lacking, or by the ragged violin scale just before the end of the so-called Rondo, K382 (in fact a set of variations). Add to all this two works recorded with really poor orchestral tone—K482 edgy, and with quite horrible muted violins in its Andante, and in K491 weedy woodwind and particularly unlovely strings—and one might be tempted to pass this set by.
But all is not lost. It might be expected that the best recordings would be the latest, in 1947; but it can't be purely by chance that by far the best performances are those made with Walter Legge as a firm producer not prepared to accept uncontrolled speeds or faulty pianism. Under his eagle eye there are imaginative and expressive readings of the Beethovenish Romanze and the intensely dramatic C minor Fantasia, K475 (though even he was unable to prevent Fischer missing out a whole beat six bars from its end). Similarly, Krips and the Philharmonia produce the most polished orchestral playing in any of the five concertos here, though Collingwood does produce an attractive lightness in the finale of K491: Barbirolli, who has difficulties in maintaining any kind of basic tempo in K482's Andante (which he starts far too slowly), has sluggish horn players and in the finale cannot curb Fischer's hurrying.
Of the solo works not already mentioned, the K330 C major Sonata is graceful, with a gentle Andante cantabile (its minor section romantically hushed); the K396 Fantasia (which Mozart left to be completed by another hand after the expo- sition) is suitably emotional, with finely graded tone; but the well-known A major Sonata is sentimentalized (the Trio of the Minuet positively swoons), and its Alla turca is full of coy dynamics. This set throws a good deal of light on Fischer, and its documentary value is indisputable; as a source of rewarding artistic experience, however, it is very variable.'