Francesco Piemontesi, SCO & Andrew Manze - Mozart: Piano Concertos 19 & 27 - The Sunday Times

The young Swiss pianist channels his sometime teacher, Alfred Brendel — who recorded his favourite Mozart concertos with the SCO — with this superb coupling of the F major and B flat major works under Manze, following their Linn accounts of the C major K503 and the D major K537, which they reprised recently with the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra. With the SCO’s elite team of wind principals, conductor and soloist find an easy, conversational rapport that sparkles in the opera buffa-like finale of K459. Piemontesi, who phrases the Allegretto in K459 and Larghetto in K595 with a patrician, singing cantabile, establishes himself as a peerless Mozartian stylist of the younger generation, while Manze upholds the SCO’s gold standard in Mozart.