Jill Crossland takes her time. That is the first thing you notice, and depending on your temperament, it will either draw you in or send you reaching for something else on the shelf.
The Mozart here is the Piano Sonata in f major, k.533/494 — one of the composer’s most searching, structurally dense keyboard works, written in two separate installments that Mozart stitched together with characteristic pragmatism. It is not the Mozart of crystalline efficiency. The first movement breathes and rolls; Crossland gives the left hand genuine weight and profile, so the counterpoint that Mozart wove into this sonata with unusual care actually registers as counterpoint rather than accompaniment. You hear the influence of Bach — Mozart had been studying the Well-Tempered Clavier in the years just before this — and Crossland seems to understand that this is learned music, music with a serious interior life beneath the f major sunshine.
Her slow movement is slower than Mozart marked. Considerably. He wrote Andante; she plays something closer to Adagietto, and there will be listeners who find this simply wrong. I am not entirely among them. The playing is luminous, the ornaments placed with real delicacy, and there are moments when the long melodic line floats in a way that feels inevitable rather than imposed. Still — the piano’s lower register, recorded close in an intimate Norfolk studio, growls with a weight that doesn’t always serve Mozart’s particular clarity. The instrument sounds like it belongs in a different century. Sometimes that’s interesting. Sometimes it’s just heavy.
The Rondo finale is flexible to a fault. Crossland quickens and slows with expressive intent, bending the refrain’s childlike simplicity against the more emotionally complex episodes. If you want your Mozart metronomic, stop here. But there’s a kind of storytelling instinct at work that I find genuinely compelling, even when I’m not quite convinced.
Then comes Beethoven.
The Piano Sonata in d minor, op. 31, no. 2 has been called the Tempest since Anton Schindler — one of the least reliable witnesses in all of music history — claimed Beethoven told him to read Shakespeare’s play for an explanation. Crossland apparently decided to ignore this entirely, and that is a defensible position. What she gives us instead is something stranger and more personal: a first movement of almost viscous slowness, the music moving like something pushing through resistance. The customary lightning never comes. The arpeggiated opening gestures, which in the hands of Brendel or Pollini arrive like a sudden intake of breath, here feel more like a slow gathering of forces — tightly coiled, waiting. It is not easy listening. At moments I wanted to shake the music free of its own weight. But there is a kind of dark authority here that earns its place, and the Adagio unfolds with a patient, inevitable logic that is genuinely arresting.
op. 110 is another matter entirely — or perhaps the same matter, deepened.
The Piano Sonata in A-flat major, op. 110 is one of the last three sonatas Beethoven wrote for the instrument, composed in 1821 when he was completely deaf, and it remains among the most spiritually searching things he ever put on paper. The fugue that closes the work — that slow resurrection through the arioso dolente and then the extraordinary inversion of the fugue subject — is among the most harrowing and consoling passages in Western music. Crossland is at her best here. The lyrical opening is warm without sentimentality. The scherzo is a little earthbound but not without humor. And the final pages, where Beethoven rebuilds the fugal edifice after seeming to have torn it down, have a quality of earned transcendence that she earns too, slowly, without rushing toward the light.
This is not a release I would hand to someone new to these works. For the Mozart, you might start with Mitsuko Uchida’s pellucid, structurally alert accounts on Philips, or Murray Perahia’s singing tone; for the Tempest, Brendel’s several versions remain essential precisely because they illuminate what Crossland deliberately avoids. But those recordings exist, and this one does something different — something slower, heavier, more inward. Crossland is a pianist with convictions, and conviction, even when it costs something, is not nothing.
Worth hearing. Worth arguing with.
