Even the best labels have a bad day now and then, and this is one. The concept is nice, and the coupling is interesting, but the performances are simply weird in a way that’s amateurish and difficult to take seriously. The Freiburg Baroque Orchestra specializes in sounding more “original” than most groups of its type, but the sheer ugly roughness of the string playing, evident at the very first forte in the piano concerto, borders on the grotesque. The players sound like a bad, undermanned, grammar-school orchestra. In German, their sound would be called a “Katzenjammer,” which, aside from “hangover,” means literally just what you think it does. Balances, with woodwinds very forward and relentlessly loud (even when they’re not supposed to be), and the fortepiano placed (so it seems) in another building–and of such diminutive tone that everyone else drowns it out–make the piece sound more like an Ivesian spacial collage or Schnittke pastiche than a Mozart concerto. Given the fact that the basic aural concept is a travesty, it’s pointless to quibble about the interpretation as such, save to say that the rondo theme of the finale seldom has sounded more awkward or stiffly phrased.
As for the Clarinet Concerto, which doesn’t suffer from quite the same oddities of balance in terms of the relationship of solo to orchestra, Lorenzo Coppola plays a colorless, hollow-toned contraption hopefully described as a “clarinet d’amour” (It’s a clarinet! No, it’s a sex toy! No, it’s both–a clarinet AND a sex toy!). I don’t care if such a device actually did exist in Mozart’s day. There’s a reason that it disappeared, and that the normal clarinet, piano, and stringed instruments were improved almost beyond recognition over the past couple of centuries. It’s because the old ones and their relatives mostly sounded like crap. This is “authenticity” of the most absurd sort. God only knows what these usually dependable artists must have been thinking. Doubtless they hoped to arrive at a “fresh” view of this overly familiar music, but what they have achieved is just embarrassing.
