Fresh, original Mozart

It’s spring in Vienna; well, OK, it’s early summer but it’s a grey day when Mozart doesn’t make you feel younger and I reckon this new release from Alim Beisembayev will do just that. In a world of infinite entertainment possibilities, Beisembayev has done the hard bit – the choosing – for you. Here we have two late piano concertos (Mozart wrote them between the ages of 30 and 32, as his own solo career wound down) charged with a grandeur, a playfulness and an endless smiling compassion that will come as a glorious corrective to anyone whose last experience of Mozart involved bodily fluids and confectionery in Sky’s hellish remake of Amadeus.

Beisembayev is one of the least flashy of the younger pianists, but he’s not short of self-assurance, and he plays his own cadenzas. The striking thing about this recording – well, it grabbed me, anyway – is the contrast between the full-bodied swagger of the Austrian radio orchestra under Howard Griffiths, and the bright, pencil-drawing clarity of Beisembayev’s articulation. Imagine an intimate but honest portrait surrounded by a sumptuous gilded frame. I assumed at first that he must be using a period or reproduction piano, but no, apparently it’s a modern Bösendorfer; a Viennese manufacturer whose creed, famously, is that a piano is essentially a string instrument.

Anyway, I’m not saying that these performances are for eternity or that this is the only way to do Mozart (there’s no such thing, thank heavens). But they’re alive, they’re fresh, and they say something original. Interpretations to sip, savour and perhaps recall next time someone tells you that these days, everything sounds the same.