Seong-Jin Cho’s Mozart on Deutsche Grammophon

from the Amazon.com Web page for this album

Readers may recall that Chopin Competition Gold Medalist Seong-Jin Cho gave his San Francisco Performances (SFP) debut recital in Herbst Theatre this past October to launch the 2018–2019 Piano Series. (Cho made his San Francisco debut in March of 2017 at a Chamber Music San Francisco solo recital.) The program he prepared for SFP demonstrated an impressive breadth of repertoire. However it did not include any compositions by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, nor did his 2017 recital. Those curious about how Cho approaches Mozart will, for now at least, have to resort to his latest Deutsche Grammophon recording, which was released almost exactly a month ago.

The album presents three compositions, each accounting for a different period in Mozart’s life. The earliest piece is the K. 281 sonata in B-flat major, one of five sonatas that he wrote while living in Salzburg in 1774. This is complemented by the K. 332 sonata in F major, one of the six sonatas he composed in Paris in 1778 on a “job-hunting” trip following his resignation from the position of court musician for Hieronymus von Colloredo, Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. The later period of Mozart’s life in Vienna is represented by the K. 466 concerto in D minor. Cho performs with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

Most important is that, on this album, Cho performs with the same clarity that distinguished his October debut recital. However, those of us that are more historically minded are likely to find in these three selections an attempt by Cho to demonstrate how each one presents a “different Mozart,” so to speak. In Salzburg he was a rambunctious teenager, brimming over with self-confidence based on his childhood touring. Cho finds ways to tease out the playful elements of the K. 281 sonata without overplaying any of them (as Mozart might have done if he knew it would annoy his employer).

The Paris sonatas, on the other hand, were written to establish Mozart’s credentials for employment. If they did not land Mozart a job, they have certainly come in handy as material for music theorists and musicologists scrambling for jobs in the current academic market. Fortunately, Cho is more interested in practice than in theory; but that capacity for clarity may lead to this recording providing audio samples at the next annual meeting of the American Musicological Society. Finally, the K. 466 concerto, written about a year before Mozart would begin his partnership with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, foreshadows the emergence of “operatic rhetoric” in the composer’s instrumental compositions.

The result is an album that not only makes for highly satisfying listening but also may teach more curious listeners a useful background fact or two about Mozart himself.