Recording of the Month
Mozart Piano Sonatas, Vol. 1
‘Peter Donohoe’s gloves-off spontaneity imbues these magical scores with a compelling vitality and freshness’
Mozart
Piano Sonata No. 6 in D, K284 ‘Dürnitz’; Fantasia in D minor, K397; Piano Sonata No. 17 in B flat, K570; Piano Sonata No. 2 in F, K280 Peter Donohoe (piano)
Somm Recordings SOMMCD 0191 69.05 mins
It is very easy to tie oneself in musicological and historiographical knots when attempting to find a convincing way through the potential minefield that is Mozart’s solo piano music. Even when employing a modern concert grand, few pianists have avoided a sense of recreating a tasteful, rose-tinted vision of 18th-century Classicism. Yet Mozart was a flesh-andblood creature intent on pushing the relatively primitive instruments of his day to their expressive limits. As a result, well-intentioned attempts to contain his music within certain interpretative and colouristic parameters can stifle its emotional range.
Peter Donohoe clearly has no such inhibitions. Without the slightest hint of the coiffured or manicured, he appears to take early Beethoven as his interpretative trajectory with a gloves-off spontaneity that imbues these magical scores with a compelling vitality and freshness. Donohoe’s radiant cantabile – captured to perfection by producer Siva Oke and engineer Paul Ardentaylor – illuminates even the most workaday of sequential passage-work. It’s underpinned by an uninhibited left hand that ensures the storm unleashed briefly by Mozart, as the development section of K280’s finale gets underway, lacks nothing in physical impact.
One of the trickiest aspects of Mozart’s solo-sonata writing
Gloves-o spontaneity imbues these magical scores with compelling vitality and freshness
is how to imbue his left-hand accompanimental figurations with interest, yet avoid the trap of getting stuck in a rhythmic groove. For Donohoe such problems seem not to exist as he varies their sonic profiles with a panoply of colours and subtle pedalling that ranges from pungently urgent octaves to impressionistic washes of colour. Occasionally, as towards the end of the exposition repeat of K570’s opening Allegro, he even allows himself an excited tempo injection that captures perfectly the exhilarated sense of moving towards closure.
Most strikingly of all, Donohoe unashamedly claims these enchanting scores for the concert hall, blowing clean out of the water any sense of delicate inspiration designed for the intimacy of the drawing room. Nowhere is this more startlingly felt than in K284 in D that opens the programme, climaxing in an extended theme and variations that carries the listener along on the tide of Mozart’s inspiration.
Donohoe’s uncluttered simplicity of vision also avoids any sense of over-thinking. Legion are the pianists who have overloaded the D minor Fantasia with furrowed-brow rhetoric – as if awestruck by the key’s primeval resonances in Don Giovanni and the
K466 Piano Concerto – whereas Donohoe enhances its expressive candour with supreme naturalness, imbuing the major-key tempo-injection with an enchanting sense of inevitability. Where others tend to micro-manage every tiny gesture with a suffocating sense of its emotional import, Donohoe thinks instinctively in long, singing phrases. It was high time someone blew the interpretative cobwebs off this still under-appreciated repertoire, and Donohoe is clearly the person to do it. PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★