The Gulda Mozart Tapes 2: Six Sonatas

"I've been preparing for this for a long time. I wanted to know how this music feels. I can now say that it feels marvellous." (Friedrich Gulda)

One of the true revelations of Mozart Year 2006: Taped in 1980 - and now released for the first time ever - these recordings are a unique document of FRIEDRICH GULDA's spellbinding, razor-edge Mozart.

The 6 Sonatas in this 2-CD set include Mozart's most passionate Sonata, the A minor K. 310, the famous A major K. 330 with its famous variation first movement, the tragic C minor K. 457 (which influenced Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata op. 13) and Mozart's final Sonata, in D major, K. 576

Now, carefully remastered under the artistic supervision of the pianist's son Paul Gulda, this second volume completes the cycle of Mozart Sonatas recorded by Friedrich Gulda in 1982, with six additional works, released for the first time

Technical problems such as distortion in the original recordings (preserved only on cassette copies) have been largely overcome, and Paul Gulda himself has newly recorded (on a Bösendorfer Imperial similar to his father's) the missing 30 seconds in the third movement of K. 457 - an elegant as well as a remarkably artistic solution to what seemed to be an intractable problem

Performances are, as ever with Gulda, "propulsive, supple and, in the slower music, serenely unaffected" (Rob Cowan, The Independent) or, in the French view "subversive, innovative, full of life and anger" (Alain Lompech, Diapason)