In the booklet accompanying his fairly recent CD of solo piano music by Mozart (Eurodisc (CD) 259 040, 1/89) Justus Frantz is quoted as saying, ''My goal is to play the music of Mozart as the music of a vital and lively musician, and not as the music of a plaster cherub''. This is hardly a brave manifesto to be nailed on doors, for surely one would think that any other performer would say the same if he or she felt that it needed saying at all. In any case, the proof of the pudding remains in the eating, and in these performances of six Mozart concertos it almost seems, surprising though this may be, as if the pianist's statement above has been a conscious and necessary argument against a natural tendency that is still all too evident in the way he treats the music.
Thus, where I expected a tough, dramatic account of the storm-and-stressful Allegro of the D minor Concerto which begins the first of these discs, I found myself instead hearing an unhurried, rather gentle performance in which agitation is mostly kept below the surface and where the cadenza (Beethoven's) becomes a particularly sentimental affair with its sonorous pedalling of a modern piano, lingerings and half-tones. A bassy and reverberant recorded sound blunts the music's edge still more. The Romance takes us further in the same direction; something like Frantz's 'plaster cherub' is indeed evoked here, a somnolent, corpulent figure sucking a Viennese bon-bon who then leaps into action in the quicker central section with such a violent contrast of pace, tone and character as to make the movement as a whole simply unconvincing; the fact that this happens at four seconds short of five minutes into a movement that here lasts over ten tells us something about its main tempo. The finale is more natural, but it is never really urgent and it sags at the cadenza.
The C minor Concerto is another tensely dramatic piece, or at any rate it should be; but here the very free tempo rubato of the pianist's first entry (2'20'') instantly robs the big Allegro of such momentum as it has until then, and Frantz's own cadenza to this movement, though well-proportioned, does not seem quite in style with the rest. Matters do not improve much thereafter, for the Larghetto is soft-centred both rhythmically and tonally, and the finale, too, suffers from the same tendency.
I have used a good deal of space on one CD and just two concertos out of the six here recorded, but must say, sadly, that my reactions to the other four do not differ significantly and that overall I can only register a degree of disappointment. This is too often a prettified view of Mozart, and of Mozart in some of his strongest music, and one that is also presented, as I have already suggested, in over-rich, plushy sound. Allegros tend to lack forward motion (No. 23 offers another example, though No. 22 is better judged), slow movements often need more elegance and flow (those of Nos. 22, 23 and 27 are deeply felt, but surely too ponderous) and finales do not sparkle and dance lightly enough, except perhaps that of No. 27. The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra under Claus Peter Flor play for the most part reliably, but one only has to hear the celebrated violin melody in the Adagio of Concerto No. 21 to realize that it is no match for the English Chamber Orchestra, playing for Mitsuko Uchida and Jeffrey Tate (Philips), a more alert and sensitive team in this work and in their coupling, the very different D minor Concerto.
The same pianist and conductor are also thoughtful and stylish for Philips in Nos. 22 and 23, bringing out the contrast between them. Murray Perahia and the same orchestra on CBS are also right on target in the D minor as well as the B flat major, No. 27, where in the present Eurodisc performance it is evident as early as the exposition of the first movement that the wind players of the Bamberg orchestra cannot give enough elegance to Mozart's shapely phrases. This Olympian work is also played superbly by Emil Gilels and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under Karl Bohm (DG), a classic version which is perhaps the outstanding one among several that are fine, here coupled with the Double Concerto in which the great Soviet pianist is joined by his daughter Elena. All the alternative versions mentioned are well recorded too.'