Mozart Jeunehomme Concerto by Greilsammer

David Greilsammer is a pianist who invites strong reactions, and not always the same one twice. That’s either a sign of an artist still finding himself or of one constitutionally resistant to formula — and the difference matters enormously.

This disc, centered on Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 in e-flat, K271, raises the question with some urgency. The Jeunehomme concerto — named, somewhat romantically, for a French pianist who may or may not have visited Salzburg in 1777 and whose identity remains deliciously unverified — is one of those works that arrives fully formed out of nowhere, or seems to. Mozart was twenty-one. The opening exchange between piano and orchestra, that startling interruption of the tutti by the soloist in the second bar, announces not just a new concerto but a new relationship between the individual and the ensemble, a new dramatic temperature. It’s the work where you hear Mozart deciding, consciously or not, that the piano concerto would be his primary arena for the rest of his life.

Greilsammer leads the Orchestre de Chambre de Genève from the keyboard — a sensible choice for an orchestra of this scale, and one that keeps the textures lean, almost chamber-like in the outer movements. His tempos in the first movement are brisk without feeling rushed, and there’s a welcome clarity in the passagework, each run articulated rather than blurred into momentum. But something is missing in the slow movement — that long, searching Andantino in c minor, one of the most extraordinary things Mozart ever put on paper, a movement that seems to anticipate the emotional world of the late piano concertos by a decade. Greilsammer plays it cleanly, even sensitively. He does not play it deeply. The silences aren’t weighted. The ornamentation, tasteful as it is, doesn’t ache.

Comparisons here are inevitable and somewhat brutal. Mitsuko Uchida’s recent traversal of this concerto — directing from the piano, as Greilsammer does — brought to the Andantino a quality of suspended grief that felt absolutely specific to this music and to her long intimacy with Mozart’s keyboard language. Alfred Brendel’s earlier recording with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields under Neville Marriner remains a model of structural coherence; Brendel understood that the movement’s sadness is architectural, not decorative. Greilsammer, by contrast, seems to approach it from the outside rather than the inside.

The program surrounding the concerto is thoughtfully, if eccentrically, assembled. The Symphony No. 23 in d, K181 — a slight but perfectly poised work from 1773, one of the Salzburg symphonies Mozart dashed off when he had to rather than when he wanted to — gets a crisp, unpretentious reading. No one is trying to make it more than it is. That’s exactly right.

More interesting is the bookending of Denis Schuler’s In-between for string quartet and orchestra with the same movement from Mozart’s incidental music for Thamos, König in Ägypten — the “Maestoso-Allegro” appearing twice, before and after the Schuler, in two different timings. The conceit is dramaturgically canny: Schuler’s piece, receiving its world premiere album here, positions itself as a kind of commentary or interlude within the Mozartian frame. Whether it earns that privilege is another matter. The writing is competent, the gesture toward the historical material respectful — but the music doesn’t so much illuminate Mozart as stand politely beside him.

Lawrence Zazzo contributes one aria from Mitridate, rè di Ponto, Mozart’s opera seria from 1770, written when the composer was fourteen. “Venga pur, minacci e frema” is a bravura piece, and Zazzo’s countertenor has an attractive purity in the upper register, though the ornamentation occasionally feels applied rather than breathed.

The disc’s real value is in the questions it asks about programming — about what it means to place new music in dialogue with old, and about whether a pianist-maestro can hold an ensemble together and play with complete musical commitment simultaneously. Greilsammer is genuinely interesting. He’s also genuinely inconsistent. This recording catches him somewhere between his best instincts and a concept that never quite catches fire. Worth hearing. Not worth unconditional enthusiasm.