 | Beautiful but not Serious
rating: 5
Mozart's piano sonatas are like listening to ice cream. They are just music. And I mean this in the most positive sense. Mozart's good artistic taste manifests itself in being profoundly unpretentious and self-effacing. As Raymond Chandler said, "There is no great and important art; there is only art... and precious little of that."
Mozart's music is inconsequential as music so rarely is. It asks very little of the listener and provides so much. It is for this reason that it is perfect background or atmospheric music. It GOES with things in the way that Schubert (e.g.) does not. I recommend eating vanilla ice cream while listening to Mozart piano sonatas. This will afford you an experience of synesthesia that blows the mind.
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Mozart piano sonatas
rating: 5
The quality of these recordings is terrific and the price is right! I play the CDs on my office computer for background music that energizes me and doesn't distract me from the details of my work. This music is perfect for that!
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Mozart, pure & simple
rating: 5
This is my favorite set of Mozart piano sonatas, next to the Mitsuko Uchida collection from Philips. Eschenbach's performance is unadorned by needless trivialities, revealing a deep reverence for Mozart' score. Instead of taking liberties with the music, Eschenbach provides a pleasurable listening experience that can be relied upon again & again. Both his playing & the DG sound are impeccable, making this set of Mozart piano sonatas a thoroughly worthwhile acqusition.
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Yes, perfect
rating: 5
Fabulous music. Simple, direct, un-affected peformances that are a delight to listen-to over and over again. At times the playing is utterly sublime. These performances are technically perfect in a smooth sense - and totally absorbing.
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Mozart-A prisoner of his own time.
rating: 4
If you were to clump all of the composers of the classical era together, mix them up, and listen to them willy-nilly in a blind hearing test, you'll never be able to tell the difference between them... until you hear Mozart. Mozart's era was not rich in harmony. To me, Haydn wrote the same symphony over and over. Stamitz and Gossec... love 'em, but they were also prisoners of this classical harmony. But Mozart was able to put his fingerprint on all of his music. You can pick his music out blindly with ease because it is unmistakingly Mozart. That's why we have a mostly Mozart festival and not a mostly Kraus (who?) festival.
As this cd shows, Mozart's music was sublime. But even he struggled with using this "harmony of the day". If you were to study the catalogues of Mozart's symphonies, sonatas, and chamber music, let's face it; you would hear a lot of turkies before you made it to the peacocks. We would have to wait until Chopin until the harmonies fattened up a little.
Having said that, you have to completely hail Mozart for taking what was available to him in his day and creating some of the most sublime music with it. It would be like for the next ten years all the world had available to eat was peas, and 200 years from now one man became immortal for the many interesting ways he was able to manipulate peas into a meal.
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