Mozart Piano Concertos – Pires and Abbado

Eight months remain before I compile my Recordings of the Year, but I already know one entry that’s going nowhere.

Maria João Pires and Claudio Abbado have been circling each other artistically for four decades now — the Lisbon-born pianist and the Milanese maestro sharing a musical sensibility so deeply matched it can feel almost uncanny. Pires has been playing Mozart concertos in public since she was seven years old. Seven. That kind of immersion doesn’t produce mere familiarity; it produces something closer to ownership, though her playing never sounds proprietary. Abbado, for his part, built his Orchestra Mozart in Bologna precisely to serve this repertoire, and has recorded more of it than almost anyone alive.

No period instruments here — Pires plays a modern concert grand, and gloriously so.

Mozart finished Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat less than a year before he died. He played the Vienna premiere himself, directing from the keyboard, as was still customary. The work carries that quality critics reach for the word “autumnal” to describe — though the word risks making the music sound elegiac, when it’s really something stranger and more elusive than that. Serene, yes. Transparent. But also shot through with a kind of hard-won lightness that only someone who has suffered can quite manage.

The opening Allegro runs past thirteen minutes and never drags for a second. Pires’s touch is almost weightless — she finds clarity without ever sounding clipped, freshness without superficiality. Abbado draws colors from the orchestra that you don’t always notice are there until suddenly they are, a woodwind detail catching the light, the strings pulling back just enough to let the piano breathe. The Larghetto is ravishing in the only way that word should be used: Pires plays it with a tenderness so unforced it almost hurts to listen to. The strings have a warmth here that I can only describe as luminous. And the closing Rondo trips along with buoyancy and wit — Pires’s concentration absolute, her artistry so natural it’s essentially invisible.

Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor is the darker, more turbulent side of this pairing. One of only two minor-key piano concertos Mozart wrote, it comes from a period of remarkable creative confidence — he had settled in Vienna, felt himself at the center of things, and played the premiere himself in 1785. Pires uses Beethoven’s cadenzas, a choice that raises an eyebrow or two but ultimately feels right; the younger composer heard something in this music that his own language could illuminate. The opening Allegro crackles with orchestral energy, and Pires navigates it with that characteristic combination of iron control and apparent spontaneity. The “Romanze” — with its insistently recurring theme — is given a reading of genuine beauty, nothing overplayed. The finale exuberant, clean-edged, precise.

Deutsche Grammophon’s engineers have done well: the sound is close and present without being clinical, the balance between piano and orchestra just right.

What Pires and Abbado achieve together is rare. Her playing is unmannered to a degree that can initially seem almost plain — and then you realize that everything is exactly where it should be, nothing wasted, nothing added for effect. That’s not simplicity. That’s a lifetime of work.

This one goes on the list.