Volume V of the Hidden Voices: Mozart Piano Sonatas series

Having listened for over half a century to tens of thousands of recordings of Mozart’s music, be it piano music, string quartets, symphonies, operas, et al, I have been hugely energized by these recordings, not because they are so great, but because they are usually so terrible.

Any ten fingers of almost any pianist can play these relatively simple notes, that however require an altogether different pianist to metamorphose them into music. Since experiencing Mozart primarily as a youngster playing my first sonatas and concertos, I immediately felt there were deeper layers than just the melodic oil slick floating at the surface, so have been steadfastly cutting away 200 years of accumulated varnish, and drilling down to the nub of Mozart’s music throughout my long career as a concert performer. The objective – lifting Mozart’s Sonatas out of the Egyptian section of museums and breathing new life into them. Though not a fortepianist, I still adhere closer to his markings than most pianists, but try to imagine how he might have played these sonatas on the modern Steinway.

The subterranean – often chromatic voices and harmonies in Mozart’s music reveal him demonstrably as a composer far greater than merely a gifted melodist, and this is why I have called this series of recordings of the complete Mozart Piano Sonatas – Hidden Voices.

Gil Sullivan, Piano