Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

There are so few "perfect" recordings of anything in this world, but this is one of them. Having had a love/hate relationship with the Mozart Sonatas since my college days (30 years ago), I have been through several sets. First, there was Walter Klien: precise, musical, but dull. Then Alicia de Larrocha: warm but mincing and mannered. From there I went to Mitsuko Uchida: not as mincing as de Larrocha, but still mannered and somewhat disconnected in phrasing. Then came Glenn Gould. Gould distorted several movements beyond sensibility, rushing Andantes and over-emphasizing counterpoint to the sacrifice of melody, but when he was not so distorting the music he was terribly exciting. Eschenbach is not, even at his best, as exciting as Gould, but like him he performs these sonatas with a rare combination of forward propulsion, energy and musical phrasing; and in the Andantes he gives us something Gould does not, moments of warmth and sensitivity. As I listened to this set, in fact, I found myself becoming less and less involved in Eschenbach's "interpretations." What I was hearing was, in my opinion, Mozart himself. As Toscanini used to say, "Is like reading the score!" And indeed it is. Every nuance, every phrase, makes perfect musical sense; and if there seems to be a certain sameness to a lot of the music, again one should blame Mozart (who, after all, wrote several of these sonatas "to formula" in order to please wealthy patrons) rather than Eschenbach. My suggestion is to listen to this set one disc at a time in order to savor the music and enjoy the warmth and sparkle of Eschenbach's performances; as a pianist myself, I cannot say enough for his total command of a technique ALWAYS at the service of the music. One may quibble over complete sets of the Beethoven sonatas but, in the case of Mozart, Eschenbach yields more consistent pleasure and score-accuracy than anyone else I have heard.