German historical-instrument specialist Siegbert Rampe is not kidding around when he promises that his MDG-label series includes Mozart's "Complete Clavier Works." His recordings include pretty much every bit of keyboard music Mozart ever set down, including a great deal of juvenilia and, here on Vol. 8, some dances better known in orchestral settings but that apparently exist in preliminary keyboard versions (the booklet notes are not entirely clear on this point). It might all seem too pedantic, but Rampe pulls it off in a way that makes the series interesting for audiences beyond scholars of Mozart or the early piano. His best decision is that he makes frequent use of a clavichord, an instrument virtually ignored even by other historical-instrument players even though it is documented to have been used often by Mozart, even after the fortepiano came along. The instrument was current for his entire life; the American-built clavichord used here was patterned after a German instrument of 1795. Even for casual listeners Rampe's discs are worth trying out in order to hear the clavichord's strange sound. Rampe generally, but not exclusively, uses it for the music of the child Mozart, and here it appears in a series of pieces from the so-called London Sketchbook, K. 15, written down by the seven- or eight-year-old Mozart at a clavichord with which the family traveled. The music is interesting enough as a window into the mind of a prodigy; the little pieces are somewhat misshapen but irrepressible. And the clavichord brings to life as no other recording does the hothouse atmosphere in which Mozart grew up, the crowded rooms of aristocrats in cultures already dying from the inside, marveling at the eerie talent. Rampe also does well with his harpsichord version of the Piano Sonata in A major, K. 331, the one with the familiar "Turkish rondo" at the end. This might seem the least likely choice among the earlier Mozart piano sonatas for performance on the harpsichord, but the intended instrument for any of these works is a tossup, and Rampe develops an intriguing alternative reading of the K. 331 finale, "conceived not," Rampe writes, "as a pleasing Janissary march but an allusion to the fashionable Turkish style, as is evident in its almost overbearingly sarcastic, exaggerated atmosphere." That might seem a tall order on a harpsichord, but listen and learn. As with other discs in Rampe's series, this one is beautifully recorded (the clavichord pieces especially), and consistently entertaining for any Mozart lover.
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