First Beethoven, now Mozart: Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes is one of classical music’s completists. But where his so-called Beethoven Journey with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra could straightforwardly take in all five of the composer’s piano concertos (performing them at the 2015 Proms and elsewhere to great acclaim), Mozart’s 27 contributions to the genre are less easily marshalled into a touring series. Andsnes and the MCO’s Mozart Momentum project focuses on works written in just two years: 1785 and 1786. Approaching 30, the composer was a Viennese celebrity and a newly sworn-in Freemason. This was a prolific period – and, according to Andsnes, a watershed when Mozart achieved “a previously unheard level of musical storytelling” in his piano concertos and beyond.
At the first two Mozart Momentum outings there was storytelling galore. The overture to the Marriage of Figaro (1786) launched the first with an urgent whisper before revealing a full-ensemble attack that could take your head off, the conductor-free MCO revelling in an acoustic that can – treated skilfully – work wonders with barely any sound. The Prague Symphony (1786) was also almost outrageously engaging: the first movement’s unexpected counterpoint in pristine focus, the second all grace and silkiness, the finale a riot of exuberance that somehow avoided tumbling over itself. Led with balletic poise by concertmaster Matthew Truscott, this was a showcase of the MCO as the Farrow & Ball of chamber orchestras: historical colour subtly adapted for 21st-century sensibilities, served up in exquisite taste.
Andsnes’s Steinway grand would have been as alien to Mozart as a 4x4 SUV, regardless of his 18th-century-style direction from the keyboard. But who cares, when the playing is this compelling? In the Piano Concerto No 20 (1785), Andsnes created time and space in passages boasting fistfuls of notes and appeared to spin his own delicate pianissimo directly from the fine orchestral fabric. Piano Concerto No 24 (1786) was similarly neat and natty, Andsnes’s right hand always quicksilver, his touch impossibly even.
I was less convinced by the inclusion of three songs (not a form for which Mozart is famous and for good reason) in the second concert, though it’s hard to imagine them more persuasively performed than by copper-toned soprano Christiane Karg. The Masonic Funeral Music (1785) felt out of place, too – a brief, if fascinatingly textured musical filler. But nothing could ultimately detract from the quality of chamber music-making: Andsnes and the MCO collaborating as creative equals, speaking with one voice.
• All Proms are on BBC Sounds until 10 October.
