MOZART:SYMPHONY NO.29/CONCERTO FOR PIANO AND VIOLIN K.315/CONCERTO FOR 2 PIANOS K.365:JURGEN KUSSMAUL(cond)/AMSTERDAM MOZART PLAYERS

The chief attraction of this reissued 1990 recording by the Amsterdam Mozart Players and their charmingly named conductor Jurgen Kussmaul is the fragmentary Concerto for piano, violin, and orchestra in D major, a completion of whose first movement closes out the program. Mozart excitedly announced plans for this work in 1778 and began work on it, but the ensemble for which it was intended broke up a few weeks after its formation. The 110 bars Mozart did notate suggest a big, ambitious work with something of the big Sinfonia Concertante for violin, viola, and orchestra in E flat major, K. 364 in it. The work's completion is the work of musicologist Philip Wilby, who found structural similarities between Mozart's fragment and his Violin Sonata, K. 306, and reasoned that Mozart might have recyled his ideas for the concerto into the sonata. The opening Allegro heard here consists of Mozart's opening plus an orchestration of material from the violin sonata. The work is significant enough within the overall arc of Mozart's career to merit this kind of speculation, and pianist Monika Leonhard and violinist Rainer Kussmaul, playing modern instruments, give it an appropriately spacious reading. The rest of this disc is not so successful; much of the Symphony No. 29 in A major, K. 201, has a disconcertingly tense, pinched quality, and the Concerto for Two Pianos in E flat major, K. 365, with soloists Ellen Corver and Sepp Grothenhuis, is competent but unexciting. It is the piano-violin concerto, still very sparsely recorded (violinist Midori has recorded the whole work with pianist and conductor Christoph Eschenbach), that likely prompted the reissue of this disc, and this is the only performance to restrict itself to the single movement that actually contains music in Mozart's own hand.