The Mozart Album - Lang Lang/Harnoncourt

Rating:3/5

Review:
Good in parts

This, as they say, is an album of two halves, Brian.  The first half, consisting of the concertos K491 and K453, while not being brilliant, is pretty well done and has some interesting features.  I'm afraid I find the second half, of solo piano works, pretty grim.

Good things first.  The concertos are, at the very least, interesting.  Harnoncourt treats them less as works of the Classical period than as almost early Beethoven.  They have a dramatic and almost romantic in feel in places.  While this isn't really to my taste, it's well done and I think it's a legitimate approach – and it suits Lang Lang's style very well.  He is much more at home with grand Romantic flourishes than with Classical formalism, so, while he reins himself in somewhat here, the overall feel does fit his style and it's a pleasing and interesting result.  It shows (to me anyway) that the Liberace jibes and the suggestion that he is just an empty showman are unjustified, as in places he plays with a lovely touch and real empathy, I think.

Sadly, I can't say the same of the solo work, recorded live.  I'm afraid I find it almost unlistenable in places – clunky, self-conscious and with little trace of Mozart but an excess of Lang Lang.  As examples, the opening movement of the A minor sonata, K310 is so rhythmically perverse that it fails to flow at all and makes almost no sense to me, and the last track is the finale of K331, the Rondo "Alla Turca" which is played so fast and with so little sense of the music itself that it sounds like bad telephone hold muzak.

So…a mixed bag, frankly.  I have a lot more respect for Lang Lang's ability than some others, but I think he also has severe limitations and commits some pretty dreadful howlers.  We see both sides of him here: some good moments in the concertos and some absolutely dreadful ones in the solo works.  I'm interested to have heard this and recognise the merits that it has, but I will be sticking with my loved recordings by Mitsuko Uchida, Murray Perahia and Maria Joao Pires, and I can only give this a lukewarm recommendation.