Early in her international career, Mitsuko Uchida gained renown for playing Mozart, garnering acclaim for her complete recorded cycles of the composer’s concertos and sonatas for the Philips label. The sonatas were recorded between 1983 and 1987 and reissued as part of the label’s 1991 complete Mozart edition. Its present budget-priced incarnation is well worth your consideration. Connoisseurs of rarified Mozart pianism will be pleased to rediscover (as I did) the sparkling symmetry and ultra-precision of Uchida’s fingerwork, the fortepiano-like ping of her sonority, her impeccable tempo choices (the effortless flow between sections in the K. 284 and K. 311 sonatas’ variation movements, for instance), and finely judged balances between hands. The latter quality serves the central slow movements in the earlier sonatas, especially regarding Uchida’s subtle shaping of the left-hand Alberti bass accompaniments.
Cyclical Mozart sonata contenders like Lili Kraus, Andras Schiff, Klara Würtz, and Claudio Arrau might make more of the music’s operatic impulses and dramatic undercurrents (Schiff’s imaginative ornaments remain a strong selling point), however, that takes nothing away from Uchida’s subtle, pinpointed, and stylish mastery, which operates at higher levels of musical and technical refinement than we hear from Ingrid Haebler’s competing space-saving budget-box Mozart sonata cycle on the same label. In short, a solid thumbs up for bargain hunting Mozart lovers and, of course, for Uchida fans.
