As with Volumes 1 and 2, the third installment of Siegbert Rampe’s MDG Mozart cycle employs fortepiano, clavichord, and harpsichord in an attempt to match each work to the instrument for which it may originally have been intended. The Nikolaus Damm fortepiano used for the two sonatas and Adagio seems to turn into a different instrument at each dynamic level: a consort of lutes when played softly, or a harpsichord, its patina emerging from loud notes in a very pianistic-sounding scale (not unlike random white kernels on a mainly yellow corn cob).
Both the D major KV 311 and C major KV 309 bristle with invention and surprise (check out the D major first-movement exposition’s famous “false” soft ending, or the C major first-movement exposition’s momentary detours into the minor mode). Rampe’s vivacious playing style, with its bouncy accents, rhythmic virility, and improvisational impulses, almost makes these works sound like they were written today rather than 200-odd years ago, and that’s a high compliment. Rampe likes to color repeats by making subtle, witty, and convincingly Mozartean alterations to the written text, and he proves similarly creative with ornaments. Had the sonata finales not concluded at slightly slower basic tempos from what Rampe established at the outset, I could recommend these performances without reservation. And the resonant sonics only bother me in the C major Adagio KV 356, where the sparse keyboard textures tend to bleed into each other.
In the KV 179 Variation set, Rampe takes tasteful advantage of his clavichord’s vibrato capabilities. Sometimes his fingerwork gets bogged down in the virtuoso thickets (the left-hand triplets, for example), but no matter how much he prods the bass lines with flamenco-like kicks, Rampe can’t disguise the music’s inherent blandness. Rampe mans the harpsichord for the KV 354 Variations and gives an elegant performance full of masterly details, such as overlapping fingers to generate harmonic tension within legato lines. Why MDG’s engineers have trouble recording the fortepiano well, yet manage to capture the harpsichord so vibrantly, is a mystery that I hope will be solved by the time Volume 4 comes around.
