MOZART: PIANO CONCERTOS; BEETHOVEN: CHORAL FANTASY - FOLDES (2 CDS)

  Describing his experience as a youth in Hungary hearing Bruno Walter play and conduct a Mozart concerto, the Hungarian pianist, Andor Foldes, stated that all in attendance ‘were happy, so obviously happy, in the service of a higher power – Mozart’s spirit’. His own fidelity to the spirit as well as the letter of music from the Classical era was happily captured on record over the best part of two decades by Deutsche Grammophon.The pianist’s ‘craftsman-like approach’ to Beethoven was warmly appreciated in Gramophone (March 2018) by Rob Cowan, reviewing two Eloquence albums of sonatas and variations (482 7053 & 482 5854), who noted how Foldes seems ‘absolutely at home in the recording studio … His playing is a pleasure to listen to on its own terms, rather like enjoying the precise workings of a meticulously engineered watch movement.’These qualities of precision and transparency are, it could be argued, still more germane to the performance of Mozart. The earliest recording prese