Description

For the great nineteenth-century pœt E. T. A. Hoffmann, Mozart was the first of the great Romantic composers — an opinion shared by most of his contemporaries, if not by most people today. Some of the Romantic ideals filter through the works presented here: the wilful simplicity of the B-flat major Sonata, which gives it particular poignancy, and the gloomier preoccupations of the C-minor Fantasy and Sonata. Canadian pianist Ludwig Sémerjian delves deep into these Mozart masterworks on Richard Wagner’s own newly-restored Steinway piano of 1876, about which the Romantic composer declared: No Steinway, no Parsifal. This recording was made in the grand hall of the Villa Wahnfried, Bayreuth, Germany, the piano’s original home.