Mozart, Martini and Sterkel Concertos – Kronenberg

Somewhere in the archives of musical history there is a ledger of near-misses, and Johann Franz Xaver Sterkel occupies a modest line in it. He met Mozart in Munich in 1777. The young genius went home and reported, with the mixture of condescension and fascination that only Mozart could manage, that Sterkel played prettily but fussily, all curled fingers and no backbone. History has generally sided with the verdict. And yet here he is, sharing a disc with the man who dismissed him, and the pairing does something useful: it lets us hear what Mozart was reacting against, and what he then transcended.

Yorck Kronenberg plays a fortepiano modeled after an 1805 Walter and Sohn, later than the instruments Mozart himself would have known, closer in spirit to the world Beethoven was beginning to conquer. The tone still has that dry, silvery bite no modern Steinway can replicate. Bass notes decay fast. Treble notes ping rather than sing. It takes some recalibration of the ear, especially if your Mozart concerto experience runs through Perahia and the ECO, or Uchida and the Cleveland — big-boned, long-lined, unapologetically Romantic readings that have shaped two generations of taste. Kronenberg offers something leaner, more astringent, and it will not please everyone. It didn’t entirely please me, at first.

The Concerto No. 20 in D minor is the piece that made Beethoven sit up. He wrote his own cadenzas for it, famously, because he couldn’t leave it alone. Kronenberg writes his own too, throughout the disc, and they are sensible rather than daring: no Brahms-scale interpolations, no attempt to out-storm Mozart’s own storm. Capriccio Barockorchester, led from the concertmaster’s chair by Dominik Kiefer rather than from a podium, fields a modest complement — five first violins, four seconds, a pair of violas, two cellos. Chamber-scaled, gut-strung, largely vibrato-free. The sound has grain to it, some real rosin-dust texture in the tuttis. Horns occasionally overreach in the Romanze; they cut through the texture more brightly than seems ideal, unbalancing what should be nocturnal stillness. But the finale has real dash, propulsive without being rushed, the fortepiano’s staccato articulation cutting cleanly through the orchestral fabric in a way a modern grand simply cannot.

Padre Martini’s Concerto in G major is the disc’s quiet discovery. Four movements, tightly built, harking backward rather than forward. This is Bologna’s great pedagogue, the man who examined the fourteen-year-old Mozart in 1770 and pronounced himself amazed, the teacher whose counterpoint treatises shaped half of Europe’s working composers without his ever writing an opera anyone remembers. His concerto keeps soloist and orchestra at arm’s length — statement, then response, rarely the intimate dialogue Mozart would make his trademark. But the slow movement surprised me: a melancholy aria, decorated first by a solo violin that seems to be auditioning for an opera house, then taken up by the fortepiano in a way that feels vocal, almost text-driven even without words. You can hear the choirmaster in him. The outer movements are lighter fare, an Allegro with some genuine sprightliness and a Vivace finale that Kronenberg dispatches cleanly, no fuss, good humor throughout.

Sterkel’s op. 26 no. 2 closes the program, and it’s a pleasant piece — pleasant in the way a well-made pastry is pleasant, satisfying without haunting you afterward. There’s real charm in the figuration, some Italianate lyricism picked up presumably during his years traveling south, but structurally it’s conservative, content to please rather than provoke. Mozart’s judgment, four decades on, still seems more or less fair. Still, it’s valuable to hear, if only because we so rarely do; most of us know Sterkel’s name, if at all, as a footnote in Mozart’s letters, not as a composer with his own catalog and his own admirers.

Is this essential Mozart? No. For the D minor concerto you’ll still want Perahia, or Uchida, or, on period instruments, Bilson with Gardiner, whose Archiv recordings from the 1980s remain benchmark. But as an act of contextualization, placing the most famous concerto of the three alongside its lesser-known cousins, this disc succeeds. Kronenberg is a scrupulous, unshowy guide, the Capriccio Barockorchester plays with evident commitment, and the engineering, recorded in a spa hall in Rheinfelden, of all places, captures both bite and bloom. Recommended, with the caveat that its real reward lies less in the Mozart than in the company he’s forced to keep.