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Special offer. Mozart: Keyboard Music Volume 1

Fantasies and Variations

Kristian Bezuidenhout (fortepiano)

Bezuidenhout offers a personal distillation that is impressively absorbing. So indeed are the timbre and sonority of the instrument...But, perhaps unexpectedly, a singing line is to the fore...

Special offer. Mozart: Keyboard Music Volume 1

Fantasies and Variations

Kristian Bezuidenhout (fortepiano)

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This release includes a digital booklet

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Bezuidenhout offers a personal distillation that is impressively absorbing. So indeed are the timbre and sonority of the instrument...But, perhaps unexpectedly, a singing line is to the fore...

About

Fortepiano phenomenon Kristian Bezuidenhout begins his multi-volume traversal of Mozart’s music for solo keyboard.

Volume 1 features an instrument by Derek Adlam modeled on an original by Gabriel Anton Walter of the type Mozart owned in Vienna. Kristian Bezuidenhout studied with Rebecca Penneys, Malcolm Bilson and Paul O’Dette. He first gained international recognition at the age of 21 after winning the prestigious first prize as well as the audience prize in the Bruges Fortepiano Competition (2001), a double honour, this being only the third time the former prize has been awarded in the history of the competition. Bezuidenhout is a frequent guest artist with the world’s leading ensembles and he now has a standing duo with the baroque violinist Petra Müllejans, artistic director of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra; their first CD, a disc of Mozart Violin Sonatas, was released on harmonia mundi USA in the Spring of 2009. Highlights of past seasons have included a complete cycle of the late Mozart Piano Concertos and the Beethoven Piano Concertos (Amsterdam Concertgebouw) with the Orchestra of the 18th Century under Frans Bruggen. Plans for the future include concerts with the Orchestre des Champs Elysées under Philippe Herreweghe; a Mendelssohn project with the Freiburger Baroque Orchestra and Gottfried von der Goltz; a tour with Les Arts Florissants; trio concerts with Viktoria Mullova & Pieter Wispelwey and more recordings for harmonia mundi.

Contents and tracklist

I. Allegro
Track length8:23
II. Andante
Track length9:53
III. Rondo: Allegretto
Track length6:31
I. Allegro
Track length6:12
II. Adagio
Track length9:32
III. Allegretto
Track length3:38

Awards and reviews

August 2010

Bezuidenhout offers a personal distillation that is impressively absorbing. So indeed are the timbre and sonority of the instrument...But, perhaps unexpectedly, a singing line is to the fore too because Bezuidenhout is consummately artistic...These interpretations - excellent to outstanding - are interpretations of today.

April 2010

This survey looks likely to set a new benchmark.

11th April 2010

He plays a copy of a Walter fortepiano, such as Mozart owned...it fits the music like a glove...Bezuidenhout’s decorations sound — as is by no means always the case — supremely natural, and in the brilliant Gluck variations, it’s as if we were eavesdropping on the composer himself improvising.

New York Times 26th November 2010

Bezuidenhout has a lively interpretive imagination, razor-sharp technique and fresh ideas about how to use the coloration of the fortepiano...to bring the music to life. If you doubt that the fortepiano can sing, listen to his plaintive readings of the Adagios from the Sonatas in F (K. 533/494) and B flat (K. 570)
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