Mozart/ Larrocha/ Davis - Larrocha Plays Mozart

Sony Classical announces another ten releases in it's popular series of Classical Masters. This new batch of budget-priced sets contains major recording projects by some of the 20th century's most celebrated musicians. Alicia de Larrocha will always be remembered as one of the most idiomatic and poetic interpreters of Spanish piano music, but this beloved artist - born in Barcelona in 1923 to two pianists - was hardly less devoted to Mozart. In the 1990s, towards the end of her career, she undertook a series of concerto recordings for RCA with Sir Colin Davis - one of the great Mozartians of his time - conducting the English Chamber Orchestra, formidable Mozart veterans themselves. Now collected for the first time in a 6-album set, these performances were widely admired by music lovers and critics. Gramophone wrote: "In their transparency and vitality these performances are outstanding. Sir Colin's partnership is affectionate and exemplary [Nos. 25 and 27]." And of their collaboration in Nos. 19 and 27: "Sir Colin's unforced way with the opening tutti of K 595, his awareness of 'all passion spent' is haunting but unobtrusive. Such sensitivity is effortlessly mirrored by Larrocha with her enviable ease, her avoidance of all artifice or attention-seeking dalliance. Few other pianists are more attuned to Mozart's mix of pain and radiance."