I'd heard the name Walter Klein before yesterday, but somehow I'd never listened to him. I think I've happened on another of those artists whom your life changes when you hear them for the first time.
I don't think K. 457 is my favorite Mozart sonata, that will always be K. 533/494 after hearing Alfred Brendel do it live at his final American recital, but K. 457 is almost beyond a doubt the best, the most complex, the most elusive. Mozart's piano sonatas were generally not among the crown jewels of his output, but K. 457 is a crown jewel, and Beethoven's Pathetique would never be conceived without it - hell, at certain points the Pathetique sounds as though Beethoven should have paid Mozart for fair use. Many harmonic sequences in K. 457 are so chromatic that they can almost sound like 1910 Schoenberg.
Even in minor-key Mozart, he is forever skirting the line between happiness and sadness, and K. 457 is one of those works where the harmonies are grim, but the rhythms smile. Just as Mozart created a d-minor opera for Don Giovanni, maybe he had a c-minor opera up his sleeve: imagine Mozart's Hamlet or Candide, comic even amid the grim fatalism.
But some of the most complex chromaticism is right amid that sublime slow movement, which could be sung by Figaro's Contessa, yet imagine the Contessa singing some of those chromatic or six-three harmonies. I don't know if they ache with eros or with agony, but for a few seconds at a time, the most sublime Mozart sounds more like a prefiguration of composers a century later, not just Schoenberg but also Debussy.
The VOX sound is unfortunately somewhat brittle and treble heavy, but in spite of it, I have never been carried away by the slow movement like this. Here is yet another major pianist in the Viennese tradition. Where are they now? Instead of 'the grand tradition' we have an international allotment of 'very serious pianists' who play 'very serious music' that seems completely unconcerned with that oral tradition passed from Beethoven to Czerny to Leschititzky. Even the best of them like Brendel and Schiff are hidebound by their denial that the grand tradition has none of their horror of the bravura. The same tradition that produced Schnabel and Horoszowski produced Friedman and Moisewitsch. It is all connected, and disconnecting the intellectual from the popular does a deep disservice to both.
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