Italian pianist Alessio Bax has recorded music from Bach to Rachmaninov since coming on the scene around 2000. Sitting squarely in the middle of the traditional repertoire comes with the risk of delivering competent but non-novel performances. Bax is stretched in beneficial ways, however, by this collaboration with Britain's youthful Southbank Sinfonia with Simon Over conducting. Artur Schnabel's comment that Mozart's sonatas are too easy for children but too difficult for concert artists applies equally to his piano ...
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Italian pianist Alessio Bax has recorded music from Bach to Rachmaninov since coming on the scene around 2000. Sitting squarely in the middle of the traditional repertoire comes with the risk of delivering competent but non-novel performances. Bax is stretched in beneficial ways, however, by this collaboration with Britain's youthful Southbank Sinfonia with Simon Over conducting. Artur Schnabel's comment that Mozart's sonatas are too easy for children but too difficult for concert artists applies equally to his piano concertos, and Bax begins with a foundation of clean, competent, but unexciting playing. Along the way, however, he gets pushed beyond that by the very detailed, layered reading of the orchestral parts in these traditional, modern-instrument recordings, and piano and orchestra enter into the kind of spontaneous dialogue that marks a really good Mozart concerto recording. Sample the first movement of the Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat major, K. 595, with Over's variegated work in the...
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