Rachel Podger writes in the booklet to this disc of four Mozart violin sonatas: “This is an ongoing voyage of discovery for me, and I feel I am only at the beginning.” Well, nowhere near the beginning is more like it. Her last release, of Vivaldi’s La Stravaganza, was wonderful; this one flirts with disaster. The first warning of trouble comes at the start of the G major Sonata K. 379, as fortepianist Gary Cooper turns the Adagio into a slow crawl, the rhythm into molasses, and the lovely music into sentimentalized mooning. Bad enough, but the Allegro that follows is downright expressionist, crushing poor Mozart with misplaced intensity, like someone violently blowing up over a trivial mishap. Mozart wrote the little C major at an age when, if he were alive today, he would be in an elementary school for the gifted. Podger and Cooper crush this slight little flower like a Red Army tank in Tiananmen Square.
The G major and B-flat major sonatas are mature works that can take interpretations freighted with more emotion than the old porcelain figurine approach that players used to bring to them, but not this much. Nowhere do we hear the elegance innate to these domestic sonatas, although in fairness, there are moments where the performers relax a bit, becoming less overbearing and more–dare we say–human. But by the time we hear the faint flicker of such playing in parts of the Andantino of the G major and sections of the other works, we’ve already been clubbed into indifference. As always, Channel Classics’ engineering is first-rate, but the closeup recording on the CD layer of this hybrid disc may exacerbate the impression of harshness in Podger’s tone.
