When this release crossed my reviewer’s desk, I immediately remembered Jennifer Lim’s name from her breathtakingly fast and repeat-less Bach Goldberg Variations recording. I thought, “how will the ‘Rapid Transit Goldbergs Girl’ fare in Mozart?” Inconsistently, as it turns out.
Lim plays the “easy” K. 545 C major sonata’s first movement with fluid grace, judiciously balancing the hands. The Andante unfolds smoothly and sensitively, even though Lim’s habitually tapered feminine endings are expressively generic and predictable. The odd thing about the sparkling and upbeat Rondo allegretto is that Lim brings out the right hand yet keeps the left hand within a relatively softer dynamic range.
In the K. 331 A major sonata’s opening Theme and Variations, Lim generates excitement in the faster variations yet holds back in slower music. Her Menuetto could have been more assertive and emphatic, but it features lovely legato phrasing. The brisk Rondo Alla Turca misses the point in regard to Lim’s softening the major-key theme’s big left-hand chords, whose percussive underpinnings are key to the music’s janissary character.
Although the first-movement Allegro of the K. 332 F major sonata abounds with affected dynamic hairpins, I like the sense of sweep that Lim generates by feeling the triple meter as one beat to a bar. However, the glib, rapid-transit pianist from the Goldbergs returns to skate across the Allegro assai, while by contrast Lim’s pale, enervated Adagio expires by the time she reaches measure 4. Despite occasional quiet notes that get swallowed up by the reverberant ambience, the sonics are fine.
