There is something quietly radical about programming the Adagio in B minor first. Most pianists, when they include it at all, tuck it away somewhere — a palate cleanser, a between-courses sorbet. Massimiliano Ferrati puts it right at the top, and suddenly the whole disc feels reordered.
Smart move. The B minor Adagio — K.540, written in 1788, three years before Mozart’s death — is one of those pieces that seems to have arrived from somewhere outside ordinary musical time. It has no business being as desolate as it is. Mozart was not, by temperament or by professional necessity, a composer who wore despair on his sleeve. And yet here it is: this single, concentrated, almost unbearably interior piece, harmonically restless, with a bass line that keeps reaching downward as though testing the floor. Ferrati shapes those bass progressions with genuine understanding. The dynamics don’t feel managed — they feel discovered, which is a different thing entirely.
Born in Adria in 1970, Ferrati studied with Konstantin Bogino and later with Paul Badura-Skoda, and you can hear both lineages without quite being able to separate them. From Bogino, one suspects, comes the structural seriousness, the refusal to let phrase-making become mere decoration. From Badura-Skoda — one of the great Mozart stylists of the postwar era, a man who spent decades arguing for historical reading practice without abandoning the singing line — comes something harder to name. Call it lightness with ballast.
The Sonata in C major, K.330, follows. Dating from around 1783, it is a work that can defeat pianists through sheer approachability. Make it too easy and it evaporates; make it too pointed and you’ve turned a summer afternoon into a seminar. Ferrati threads this needle with something close to grace. The scale passages in the first movement have real clarity — not the clinical, metronomic clarity of a student demonstrating artistry, but the kind that sounds inevitable, like water finding level. The second movement’s central section, where the key darkens and the mood briefly contracts, is handled without fuss; Ferrati simply lets the harmonic shadow fall and waits for it to pass. That patience is rarer than it sounds.
Then the turn to K.310.
This is the other Mozart — the one Schumann would have recognized, the one that makes comfortable listeners shift in their seats. The Sonata in A minor was composed in Paris in 1778, and the circumstances matter even if you resist biographical determinism. Mozart’s mother died in Paris that July. The French musical establishment largely ignored him. The “Paris” Symphony, K.297, written in the same weeks, is relentlessly cheerful — almost aggressively so — but K.310 carries a different freight. Whether the personal grief is encoded in the music or simply coincident with it, I’ve never entirely decided. What’s unarguable is the turbulence of the first movement, the strange, suspended quality of the Andante cantabile, and the almost violent momentum of the finale. Ferrati doesn’t prettify any of it. The desolation is present, the emptiness genuine — there are moments where the sound seems to thin to almost nothing, and the silence around the notes feels earned rather than theatrical.
The disc closes with K.331, the Sonata in A major, a piece everybody thinks they know because of its finale — the Alla Turca, which has spent two centuries as a pedagogical warhorse and ringtone ancestor. What gets lost is the set of variations that opens the work, music of extraordinary refinement and, when played well, considerable depth. Ferrati gives them space. He doesn’t rush to get to the famous ending, and the variations accumulate weight rather than merely marking time.
Competing versions? The field is not exactly thin. Mitsuko Uchida’s Mozart sonata cycle remains a benchmark — that combination of scholarly precision and sheer musical imagination is hard to match. Maria João Pires brings something warmer, more Romantic in the best sense. And Badura-Skoda himself, Ferrati’s teacher, made recordings that set a standard for stylistic fidelity. Against that company, Ferrati holds his ground. He isn’t quite in the top tier — there are moments, particularly in K.331, where I wanted more risk, more of the quality that makes great Mozart playing feel like eavesdropping on something urgent. But he is a serious artist making a serious record, and serious Mozart playing is not so common that we can afford to be dismissive.
Worth your time. Worth more than one hearing.
