Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim & Mozart

This week's Tuesday Blog features no.. 340 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages. It  can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast340

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This week’s podcast, closing out the second quarter of 2020, is one more in our series dedicated to Mozart’s piano concertos in sets of three, and follows a pattern we used in 2015 with a pair of pianists who each get one solo concerto and combine in a double concerto.

Unlike other montages in this series, with the benefit of about 7 of these if we include three Tuesday playlists from a Time Life compilation, we are considering three concerti we’ve programmed at least once in the past.

The two solo concerti – nos. 8 and 17 - were featured on a Tuesday Blog and on a Friday podcast respectively, and are being repackaged here (with new performances) for future daily podcasts. Concerto no. 10 (the concerto for two pianos, K. 365) was in another montage back in 2012, again with different soloists.

Vladimir Ashkenazy has been featured in this series already (January last year), and the two conceri in which he is featured are part of his complete Mozart set for Decca where all the “solo concerti” feature him conducting the Philharmonia orchestra from the keyboard. In the two “multiple keyboard” concertos in that set (concerto for 2 and 3 keyboards), Decca reused performances part of a separate one-time disk featuring him and Daniel Barenboim, with the latter conducting the English Chamber Orchestra from the keyboard; a third pianist, a Barenboim protégé from the time, sits at the third keyboard for the concerto for three pianos.

For the Lützkow concerto, I dug out a performance by Barenboim and the same orchestra. In the 1960s, while still in his twenties, Daniel Barenboim joined forces with the English Chamber Orchestra to record a groundbreaking set of the complete Mozart Piano Concertos, conducting from the keyboard. Later, he recorded them again with the Berlin Philharmonic, but the English Chamber Orchestra version still has the edge for its bite and beauty, operatic mellifluousness offset by apparently boundless energy and an atmosphere of inspired and intimate music-making from start to finish.

I think you will love this music too.