This seven-disc set is the first complete recording of the piano sonatas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on the composer's own fortepiano. The instrument was built by Anton Walter around 1782, and Mozart played it from 1785. The American pianist and Mozart scholar Robert Levin adds three unfinished sonata movements that he completed himself, and ornaments the repeats as a player of Mozart's time would have done.
The instrument belongs to the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, which co-produced the edition, and Levin has played it many times at the foundation's Mozart Week. His work on Mozart also includes a completion of the Requiem and a cycle of the piano concertos with the Academy of Ancient Music. He recorded the cycle in February 2017 and February 2018 in the Great Hall of the Salzburg Mozarteum, with Markus Heiland as Tonmeister and Manfred Eicher producing. The 100-page booklet holds an essay on the sonatas by Ulrich Leisinger of the Mozarteum, a performer's note by Levin and facsimiles of manuscripts.
The Walter has leather-covered hammers and a light action, with a silvery treble, a woody tenor and a knee-operated damper that Levin uses for colour. In the C minor Fantasia K. 475 and Sonata K. 457 the fast figuration races through a transparent, almost electric sound, and the first movement of the sonata sinks into the dark lower middle register. The Alla Turca finale of K. 331 becomes a sharply pointed, almost orchestral Janissary piece. Levin's completion of the C major movement K. 42 opens the set, the B flat K. 400 starts the fourth disc and the G minor K. 312 closes the seventh.
BBC Music Magazine made the set its Recording of the Month in 2022, and it was nominated for the magazine's Instrumental Award in 2023. There Jessica Duchen called the whole project "a stunner", faithful to the letter but above all to the spirit. In The New York Times David Allen heard "Mozart living and breathing" in these performances. In Gramophone Phillip Kennicott found the completions seamless, and Diapason recalled that Levin had already written a university thesis on Mozart's unfinished works in 1968.
Seven CDs in a box with booklet, ECM New Series 2710-16, first released in September 2022.
