Christian Zacharias recorded all the Mozart piano sonatas for EMI. The hit and miss quality of that undertaking extends as well to his first solo outing for MDG. Zacharias’ fluent fingers are refined to a fault. Dynamic gradations, for instance, have an overly worked out quality to them, offering little surprise to listeners. The pianist often pulls back at climactic moments, such as the pedal point toward the end of the amazing Eine Kleine Gigue, or the harmonic sleights of hand in the sublime B minor Adagio. Conversely, Zacharias serves up the C minor Fantasy K. 396 in a perverse, detached manner that evokes Glennn Gould’s ghost, with brutal trills that perhaps are better suited to Prokofiev. The A minor Rondo, however, gets a stylish, not overly intense reading, but the grounded, concentrated C minor Fantasy (K. 475) shows what Zacharias can really do in this repertoire. Incidentally, the controversial 10 measures normally tacked onto the end of the D minor Fantasy K. 397 are omitted in this collection.
