The works on this disc testify to Deutsche Grammophon’s high sonic standards in the early to middle 1950s, and they sound impressively vivid, clear, and well-balanced in their newly minted CD incarnations. Their musical appeal, however, likely will be limited to collectors with a special interest in the artists involved rather than to vital, passionate Mozart playing. Carl Seemann’s dependable, tasteful traversal of the Coronation Concerto’s solo part makes a small-scaled and workaday impression next to the drama, inflection, and harmonic tension Friedrich Gulda generates in his contemporaneous mono recording (reissued on Testament). The slow movement particularly points up the pianists’ differences as we compare Seemann’s slow and square treatment with Gulda’s fleeter flexibility.
Andor Foldes joins Seemann for the Double Concerto, whose outer movements downplay the regal pomp and glittering interplay that characterize the work’s finest modern recordings (Murray Perahia and Radu Lupu, to cite one favorite). While Fritz Lehmann secures focused, rhythmically incisive playing from the Bamberg Symphony in the D major Rondo, the orchestra’s efforts are compromised by Seemann’s dour and lifelessly correct fingerwork (for the antidote, go to Edwin Fischer’s pulsating, red-blooded 78 rpm account). The A major Rondo is better, although Seemann’s unyielding left-hand triplet accompaniments provide less of an underpinning to the right-hand melodies than a tightly tailored straightjacket. I’m afraid tight-lipped Mozart playing is not my cup of tea.
