Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART (1756-1791)
Arrangements by Ignaz
Lachner
Piano Concerto No. 20 K.466 [30:29]
Piano Concerto No. 21 K.457 [27:21]
Alon Goldstein (piano)
Rachel Calin (bass)
Fine Arts String Quartet
rec. 24-26 June 2014, American Academy of Arts & Letters, New York
City
NAXOS 8.573398 [57:56]
You know you have everything, doubly, triply, and quintuply in your
collection, when you reach for recordings of Mozart’s concertos
transcribed for piano, string quartet, and double bass. Ignaz Lachner was
the person that thought to make these works more accessible to the greater
public by means of transcribing them. This is really the reason for most
transcriptions, even when they go the other way around: from small to big,
from, say, string quartet to orchestral treatment. That reasoning died, with
the advent of recordings, but often the transcriptions offer us different
viewpoints of familiar works, are half-new, beautiful creations of familiar
works. They are a chance to enjoy afresh that with which we are familiar.
Brahms’ Piano Quartet in Schoenberg’s gigantic orchestration
becomes his Fifth Symphony. Bach’s Passacaglia has morphed through
anything from two-piano versions to Stokowski’s wonderful orchestral
perversion. Bach himself pruned Italian composers from concertos to inspired
solo-keyboard works. György Kurtág turned Bach works into hauntingly
gorgeous pieces for piano four hands. It’s a tremendously rich field
of musical recycling and I’m a real sucker for it.
There’s noble precedent, too: Mozart himself authorized and
published four of his concertos for this treatment … but Nos. 11-14,
not these two of Mozart’s great piano concertos, the D Minor Concerto
No.20, K.466 and the C Major Concerto No.21, K.467. For the early ones,
we’ve reviewed a bunch of recordings on MusicWeb International before
and I agree with the general sentiment:
Gottlieb Wallisch (Linn) is the go-to account if you
need Mozart concertos in their trimmed-down version. Alon Goldstein and the
double-bass augmented Fine Arts Quartet won’t make this list, or at
least not mine. There is nothing that I learned from these transcriptions
about the originals. There was no moment of strange delight, no new angle,
no novel timbre. None of the playing makes me halt, rest and nod my head;
the tone of the strings is straight-forward and faultless at best. The piano
plays all the notes but very matter-of-factly, and in total, it
doesn’t strike me as much more than an excellent sight-reading effort.
The music is really just the same as the original thing, except
malnourished, impoverished, a little scratchy, and a good deal ungainly.
I’ll be more blunt, still: There’s too much great music,
transcribed or otherwise, in more wonderful performances out there for me to
ever listen to this again. Next.
Jens F. Laurson
