Mozart Violin Sonatas Complete – Belder and Baudet

Mozart Without the Mythology

This sprawling eight-disc set from Brilliant Classics presents Mozart’s complete violin sonatas in what amounts to a tale of two approaches—and the contrast proves more instructive than comfortable.

The first two discs offer us the boy Mozart, those early sonatas written between ages seven and ten that are really keyboard pieces with violin accompaniment. Pieter-Jan Belder and Rémy Baudet perform on period instruments, recorded in that Remonstrantse Doopsgezinde Gemeente in Deventer—a venue whose acoustic I know well, with its particular blend of clarity and slight dryness. Here the harpsichord dominates, as it should. These are charming trifles, really, though KV 9 in G minor already hints at something darker lurking beneath the rococo surface. Baudet’s baroque violin has that slightly reedy quality in the upper register that some listeners find authentic, others merely thin. I’m somewhere in between. The playing is stylish, unaffected, perhaps a touch careful—but then these pieces don’t demand the kind of risks that later Mozart requires.

Then we leap forward to 1989 and Salvatore Accardo with Bruno Canino, recorded across six discs that cover everything from the Mannheim and Paris sonatas through the mature Viennese masterworks. And here’s where things get complicated.

Accardo was, of course, a major violinist—still is, for that matter—and his tone remains sumptuous, that Italian warmth never quite absent even in Mozart. But there’s something oddly detached about these performances, as if he and Canino are reading through the music with impeccable manners rather than truly inhabiting it. The great A major Sonata KV 526, which should blaze and sing, sounds merely well-bred. In the slow movement “Accardo’s ”vibrato—continuous, generous—smooths away the edges that make Mozart’s chromatic progressions so piercing.

Listen to the way they handle the E minor Sonata KV 304, that extraordinary work written in Paris just after his mother’s death. The grief should be palpable, barely contained. Instead we get refinement. Exquisite refinement, granted, but the desperation that lives in those pages goes missing. Canino plays with intelligence throughout, his passagework clean, his sense of structure sound. But where’s the dialogue? These are supposed to be true duos—by the Vienna years, Mozart had thoroughly emancipated the violin from its earlier subsidiary role—yet the balance often favors the piano, and not in ways that illuminate the music’s architecture.

The recorded sound from 1989 holds up reasonably well, though there’s a certain studio blandness to it, everything nicely placed but lacking the sense of real acoustic space. The later sonatas, particularly KV 481 in E-flat and the magnificent B-flat KV 454 (written for Regina Strinasacchi, who sight-read the violin part while Mozart played from memory because he hadn’t finished writing out the piano part—but I digress), deserve a more vibrant sonic frame.

What puzzles me about this set is the missed opportunity. You have major artists, adequate recorded sound, the complete works… and yet the whole enterprise feels dutiful rather than inspired. Compare these readings to, say, the Perlman-Barenboim traversal, or better yet, the period-instrument accounts from Manze and Egarr, and you realize how much dramatic possibility Accardo and Canino leave unexplored. Mozart’s violin sonatas aren’t drawing-room entertainment—well, some of the early ones are, but even KV 30 has its moments—they’re psychological dramas in miniature, full of shadows and sudden shifts of mood that these performances too often iron flat.

The two variations sets on French songs, KV 359 and 360, fare better. Here the decorative element gives Baudet and Belder something specific to work with, and their period instruments seem more naturally suited to the task. The G minor variations, especially, have a melancholy that comes through.

Brilliant Classics has done its usual competent job with presentation—nothing fancy, but the documentation is adequate and the discs are sensibly organized. At budget price, you get eight hours of music for less than many single full-price releases. The question is whether you want these particular eight hours.

For the early sonatas, Belder and Baudet are perfectly acceptable, if not quite as characterful as some alternatives. For the mature works, I’d point you elsewhere—the Accardo-Canino partnership, for all its technical accomplishment, simply doesn’t dig deep enough into this music’s emotional terrain. Mozart deserves better than good behavior.

A mixed achievement, then: useful for completists, adequate for background listening, but not the kind of Mozart-playing that stops you in your tracks and makes you hear familiar music with fresh ears. Which is, finally, what we want from any release that asks for our time and attention.