Mozart Piano Sonatas – Gabriele Tomasello

Every few months another young pianist decides the world needs a fresh Mozart cycle, and every few months I ask myself the same unfashionable question: does it?

Gabriele Tomasello is not without gifts. Listen to the way he shapes the opening measures of the Sonata in G, KV 283 — clean articulation, an unforced sense of buoyancy, nothing fussy in the phrasing. He has clearly absorbed the lesson that Mozart’s Allegros should dance rather than march, and in the outer movements there’s a lightness of touch that avoids the metronomic four-square playing that ruins so many young Mozartians. But lightness alone won’t get you far here. The ghosts of Clara Haskil and Dinu Lipatti still hover somewhere over the keyboard, insisting that simplicity is the hardest of all disguises to wear convincingly.

The Sonata in A major, KV 331, is the disc’s obvious calling card — those variations, that “Alla Turca” finale everybody thinks they know before the pianist has played a note. Tomasello’s account is decent, even sensible. It is also, if I am honest, a little faceless. The variations pass by amiably enough, but where is the wit, the sly rhythmic mischief that Uchida finds, or the architectural inevitability Barenboim brings even in his most idiosyncratic Mozart recordings? Tomasello observes the dynamics, mostly, but seems reluctant to trust his own instincts when a phrase might want more air, more rubato, more daring.

The Fantasia in D minor, KV 397, fares better. Its improvisatory character suits him. There’s an appealing tentativeness to the arpeggiated opening, a hush before the storm that feels genuinely searched-for rather than merely observed on the page. I found myself leaning forward here in a way I didn’t during the C major sonata, KV 309, which plods rather where it should sparkle. Tomasello’s tempo choices are fine on paper, but the music never quite catches fire, never surprises.

By the time we reach the late Sonata in B-flat, KV 570, one of Mozart’s most inward, autumnal works, written in the last, straitened years in Vienna, when commissions were drying up and the letters to Puchberg grew more desperate, one wants a pianist willing to let some shadow into the room. Tomasello’s is a sunny, well-lit reading. Perfectly pleasant. Not much shadow.

Acte Préalable’s engineering doesn’t do him favors, either. The piano sits oddly recessed in the soundstage, as though recorded from the back of a smallish hall rather than close up, robbing the instrument of some of its natural bloom in the middle register. A curious choice, since intimacy is exactly what late Mozart needs.

None of this makes Tomasello a bad Mozartian. It makes him, at this stage, an unformed one: technically assured, temperamentally cautious, still finding his own voice inside music that punishes anyone without one. The pity is that this repertory is already so thoroughly occupied. Pires on Brilliant Classics gives you translucence and unforced poetry across five discs for a fraction of this single volume’s price. Gould, infuriating as he can be, never once sounds like he’s playing it safe. Uchida combines scholarship with spontaneity in a way that still, decades on, sounds newly minted.

Where does that leave volume one of Tomasello’s cycle? Worth a curious ear, perhaps, if you stumble across it cheaply. Not, on this evidence, an essential addition to a groaning shelf. I wish him well with the remaining sonatas. He’ll need considerably more personality, and considerably more nerve, to make anyone but the most devoted collector sit up.