These Mozart concerto recordings, packaged by Deutsche Grammophon in several different ways and now brought together for one last fling, were made in the 1980s. They feature legendary Bohemian-Austrian-American pianist
Rudolf Serkin, just shy of or just beyond his 80th birthday, returning to a set of works he knew well -- of all the central European emigrants who enlivened American concert stages around the middle of the last century,
Serkin's circumspect style was perhaps the best suited to Mozart. These, however, are not the Mozart performances for which
Serkin is known; he had recorded most of these works for Columbia (now Sony) a quarter century earlier, and here he takes a leisurely, rather professorial look back. Listeners who particularly admired
Serkin will find plenty to enjoy in these seven discs. The artless little rondo that concludes Mozart's piano concerto output in the last movement of the Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat, K. 595, was a minor specialty of
Serkin's, and he brings a special kind of sweetness to it here. The conversation between
Serkin and
Claudio Abbado's
London Symphony Orchestra (and, in the Piano Concerto No. 16, K. 451, the youthful
Chamber Orchestra of Europe) is a lively one, with
Abbado seeming to guide
Serkin into safe channels. Deutsche Grammophon's 1980s sound has been smoothly transferred to CD. These aren't top choices for Mozart's concertos, but they do perhaps constitute the "collectors' edition" advertised on the cover --
Serkin was an artist who shaped the world's conceptions of the "Viennese school," and there's much to be gained by tracing the evolution of his style over his long life.