This disc is part of an exhaustive series covering Mozart's keyboard music on period instruments -- not only the fortepiano and harpsichord, but also the less frequently encountered clavichord. As with other discs in the series that feature Mozart's juvenilia, German keyboardist Siegbert Rampe, who augments his historical instruments with such practices as improvised ornaments in repeats, uses the clavichord with delightful effect in most of those works and also in the extremely rare Marche funèbre del Signor Maestro Contrapuncto, K. 451 -- a humorous work despite its title. The Sir Counterpoint Master was Mozart himself, who wrote the tongue-in-cheek march for one of his students, and the clavichord, the studio and home instrument for many musicians (including, for much of his life, Mozart himself), brings out the humor in a way that neither of its larger cousins would have. The other significant feature of this album is the use of a 1771 harpsichord with multiple registers that Mozart seems to exploit in the Piano Sonata in B flat major, K. 281 -- Mozart's third sonata. From the D major Sonata, K. 284, onward, Mozart clearly seems to have a piano in mind, but the first three can go either way, and Rampe here manages to bring something new to the B flat work by using not just a harpsichord, but a harpsichord that seemed to see what was coming and try to adjust. The harpsichord, however, is a strange choice in the experimental Praeludium/Modulation F-C, K. 624; this work, something like a page out of Mozart's notebook, seems to presuppose the availability of piano textures and dynamics. Rampe doesn't discuss the piece in his notes at all. As usual, however, he's a sensitive Mozart interpreter who probably comes closer than anyone else to making the sounds Mozart himself would have made at the keyboard.
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