Mozart Piano Concerto No 9 – Uchida and Cleveland Orchestra

There is a moment near the end of the slow movement of the Piano Concerto no. 9 in E-flat major — the one long called the Jeunehomme, though scholars now suspect the dedicatee was actually Victoire Jenamy, a Viennese pianist of some reputation — where the piano seems to stop arguing with grief and simply inhabit it. Mitsuko Uchida finds that moment. She always does.

This is live Mozart, recorded at Severance Hall with the Cleveland Orchestra, and it sounds like it.

What Mozart accomplished with K271 in 1776 still staggers. He was twenty. The piano enters in the second measure — not politely waiting its turn but interrupting, practically finishing the orchestra’s opening phrase — and in doing so announces an entirely new kind of relationship between soloist and ensemble. Uchida understands this as confrontation, as conversation, as something closer to love. The Allegro’s two governing motifs — one belonging to the piano, one to the orchestra — are kept in productive tension throughout, neither allowed to simply win. The Cleveland strings play with a refinement that stops just short of prettiness, which is exactly right.

The Andantino is in C minor. Mozart doesn’t write that key lightly.

Uchida’s approach here is almost unbearably concentrated — the ornaments placed with the care of someone who knows they are not decoration but argument. There is sorrow in this playing, real sorrow, but she never lets it tip into self-pity. The line keeps moving. Hope, as the movement winds toward its close, feels genuinely earned rather than merely asserted.

The Rondo finale bursts out like a commedia troupe arriving onstage — buoyant, a little rowdy, unmistakably theatrical. The Minuet episode at the center provides a brief pocket of stillness, and Uchida shapes it with exactly the kind of cool, almost ironic restraint that makes the surrounding high spirits feel even more charged when they return.

Then there is the Piano Concerto no. 21 in C major, K467, completed in 1785 — a work so thoroughly domesticated by its association with a 1967 Swedish film that a serious rendition has to work against the audience’s memories of itself. The Elvira Madigan tag, which attached to the Andante sometime in the late sixties, has done that slow movement no favors. Uchida essentially ignores the problem by playing the movement as if she has never heard it called anything but what it is: one of Mozart’s most harmonically daring slow movements, the melody hovering above a restless, muted string accompaniment that never quite settles.

The first movement is where Uchida is most fully in command — the martial C major of the opening transformed, in her hands, into something at once ceremonial and intimate. She directs from the keyboard, and the Cleveland Orchestra responds with the kind of attentiveness you hear from players who are genuinely listening rather than merely executing. The balance between wind soloists and strings is ideal; the oboe in the development section has a plaintive edge that catches you off guard.

For sheer conversational wit in the finale, I still return to Murray Perahia’s self-conducted recordings with the English Chamber Orchestra — there is a lightness there, a rhythmic elasticity, that these Cleveland performances don’t quite match. And Daniel Barenboim’s old Berlin Philharmonic recordings carry a different authority entirely, weightier, more consciously symphonic. Uchida’s own earlier set with the ECO under Jeffrey Tate remains lovely.

But this new Cleveland series — of which earlier installments brought us the K488 and K491 paired, and then the K466 with K595 — has an urgency and an improvisatory presence that studio recordings simply cannot manufacture. Something is at stake in these performances. You can hear it.

Mitsuko Uchida has been playing Mozart for most of her life, and she still sounds like she is discovering things. That is not a small achievement. It is, actually, the whole point.