Northern Sinfonia, Imogen Cooper - Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos. 9 & 23 (2006)

Various American orchestras have begun issuing selected live performances on compact disc, but this British release represents something slightly different: an effort not by an orchestra but by a venue, the Sage Gateshead concert hall in Newcastle upon Tyne, to inscribe and publicize the music heard therein. The initial results are not just encouraging but spectacular. Pianist Imogen Cooper, directing the Northern Sinfonia from the keyboard, delivers two of the subtlest and loveliest Mozart concerto performances heard anywhere in years. Cooper is sensitive and original in her conceptions of the solo parts; she accomplishes the trick of making the slow movement of the Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K. 488, sound deeply sad without turning it into Chopin, for example. But it is really her control over the orchestra that makes these performances stand out. Mozart's woodwind lines shine through the texture in their own individual colors, and articulation is managed in such a way as to sharpen the phrase divisions of the music, both within orchestral or solo passages and where pianist and orchestra interact. Cooper's Mozart has dozens of distinct planes that mesh like clockwork as the performance proceeds. For one of 100 examples that might be given, listen to all the detail that emerges at the beginning of the recapitulation of the first movement of the Piano Concerto No. 9 in E flat major, K. 271, about six and a half minutes in. This concerto, a fully characteristic example of the large-scale architectonic thinking that was most fully realized in Mozart's keyboard concertos, is especially nicely realized here, with small details feeding into a larger structure with unerring logic. It seems to be the British who most often do Mozart in the traditional way these days, on modern instruments, with full symphony and with the conviction that modern sensibilities have something to add to the music. This recording shows that there is still plenty of room to go deeper into the music using such methods. The live sound is unusually clear and devoid of distractions.