Gottlieb Wallisch - Mozart: Paris & Vienna - BBC Music Magazine

Gottlieb Wallisch, a competition winner and now an established international artist, has recorded a second Mozart CD for Linn Records. Like the first, reviewed in November 2010, its compilation of sonatas and stand-alone pieces makes for an appealing, astutely varied programme. It testifies both to the young Viennese pianist's impressively assured command of idiom, and to the infinite richness of Mozart's solo keyboard oeuvre (still undervalued though it remains in certain quarters). The disc's subtitle, ‘Paris and Vienna', indicates the influences at work on Mozart in such a bill of fare. The two supremely elegant middle-period sonatas, No10 in C, K330 and No12in F, K332, were clearly formulated during Mozart's long Parisian sojourn. By contrast, the stark late B minor Adagio, K540, belongs to a later and less optimistic period in the composer's maturity.

Wallisch's readings contain many attractive qualities: immaculately clean fingerwork, fine phrase-characterisation and sense of balance. As a whole, the CD is a pleasurable play-through, and recommendable as such.