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03/12/2025
“Mozart 1-2-3-4”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Piano Quartet n° 1 in G minor, K. 478 – Piano Trio n° 3 in B‑Flat major, K. 502 – Sonata for piano and violin n° 25 in F major, K. 374e [377] – Piano Sonata n° 4 in E‑Flat major, K. 189g [282]
Julien Libeer (piano), Pierre Colombet (violin), Máté Szucs (viola), Eckart Runge (cello)
Recording: Westvest 90, Schiedam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (October 2024) – 81’54
harmonia mundi HMM 902696.97 2 CDs (Distributed by [Integral]) – Booklet in French, English and German
 
This recording is the project of Belgian pianist Julien Libeer, which explains why the piano is the one instrumental constant throughout the program, which begins with by far the most familiar piece here, the Piano Quartet in G minor. French violinist Pierre Colombet sets the tone for the performance which, to an American ear, is typically French in its delicacy and refinement. Colombet’s tone is colorful but slender, his touch light, with much exquisite sotto voce playing, and the other players follow his lead for the most part—or perhaps that of Libeer, who is generally more flowing and sonorous than sparkling. It’s all tasteful and lovely, but I miss some expressive variety, more robustness or weight of tone.
I feel ambivalent towards Mozart’s chamber music with piano. Unlike Brahms, who in such works was often inspired to his most exquisite combination of poignancy and drama, Mozart can seem drawn by the presence of the piano to a kind of extroverted facility rather than that wondrous fusion of buoyance and melancholy with a certain touch of grandeur marking such absolute masterpieces as the Clarinet Quintet. The chamber works here are all magnificently wrought products of Mozart’s maturity, but I think I am hardly alone in having neglected the piano trios, and the violin sonatas too that are seldom counted among Mozart’s best chamber music. The trio included here, in B‑Flat, is wonderfully vivacious, and the Violin Sonata in F major has some breathtaking melodic writing (try a few bars into the first movement, or the second-movement theme and variations). Libeer and Colombet, with cellist Eckart Runge in the trio, bring all the same virtues to these works as to the quartet, but a more robust and assertive approach would have helped to reduce the sense that this is not Mozart at his most profound—a sense, to be candid, I get in the beloved as well, past the striking opening notes.
Rounding off the program is the Piano Sonata, K. 282. I tend to imagine mature Mozart beginning with Köchel numbers in the 300s, but I am not sure why: Mozart’s output as he neared age twenty may have been less consistent than it would soon become, but at its best it was completely assured in both craft and inspiration, and this sonata is manifestly the work of a great melodist and harmonist. Libeer is somewhat dreamier and less urgent than I would prefer, in keeping with the general interpretive bent of the program—but as with everything else, there is no lack of musicality. The recording is certainly worth hearing if the program appeals and if one fancies hearing this music played with the utmost refinement and delicacy, abetted by a very close recording.
Samuel Wigutow
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