If I had to describe the photograph on this CD booklet’s front, it would appear that violinist Mark Steinberg and pianist Mitsuko Uchida had just argued, and she walks away. Steinberg gazes at Uchida in the distance, holding his instrument, while she closes her eyes, shutting him out, determined to protect her turf. That’s more or less what their Mozart sonata performances sound like. Beautiful, hammerless sonorities materialize from Uchida’s piano, voiced and phrased without the slightest bump in the line or an inadvertent accent. By contrast, Steinberg’s silvery tone flirts between the vocal orientation of modern fiddle playing and the bald, vibratoless aesthetic that period violinists hold dear. He’ll start one phrase strongly, only to sustain another by a thread, so to speak. Unison passages between both instruments are impeccably calibrated and timed, yet they rarely come off like shared (let alone spontaneous) moments.
The F major sonata’s Minuet is a case in point. In the C major and E minor sonatas’ respective first movements, Steinberg finds far less character and variety than the music suggests, and he scales back accompanying patterns to the point where they nearly disintegrate. At least Steinberg and Uchida emphasize the A major sonata’s first-movement cross-rhythms and maintain the momentum–if not the urgency–implied by Mozart’s Molto Allegro marking, while the Presto finale delights by virtue of the musicians’ witty inflections. But the duo’s precious, overrefined ensemble values transform the slow movement’s poignant lyricism into a bland background landscape. Reclaim this music’s warmth, eloquence, and expressive potential with Lupu/Goldberg (Decca)–or, if you can find it, the more distinctive and red-blooded Klien/Grumiaux cycle, also from Philips.
