In a catalog filled to the brim with world-class Mozart concerto recordings, any new contender must offer comparable excellence to win over discerning music lovers. This one does not. You get little inkling of Mozart’s colorful orchestration and textural diversity in the English Symphony Orchestra’s bland, undifferentiated, and spongy execution (the scrawny strings particularly hurt), compounded by distant, dynamically restricted sonics that relegate the proud brass and timpani flourishes to the hinterlands. In fact, the whole orchestra often seems pushed to the back of the hall. Phrase shaping in slow movements barely exists among very confused balances between instrumental strands, and there are pockets of imprecise chording and patchy intonation no potential consumer would care to hear over and over again (K. 415 and K. 488, for example). If “one dynamic fits all” describes your Mozartean preference, then you can say that Jeremy Menuhin plays prettily, even though his pianism cries out for dramatic inflection, chamber-like interplay, and imaginative zest. Nimbus should seriously rethink this project before it goes ahead with Volume 2.
