M. J. Pires: The Complete Mozart Piano Sonatas: Comparing the Early Columbia and Later DG Recordings

This is the first complete recording of the Mozart Piano Sonatas by Maria João Pires (often referred to as Maria João Pires), the Portuguese pianist who is already stepping into the realm of the great masters. It was reissued as part of DENON’s 250th anniversary Mozart edition, which is what prompted me to write about it here. The disc won both the ADF Grand Prix and the Edison Award. Recorded when Pires was thirty years old, it was captured — remarkably — at Iino Hall in Tokyo in 1974 as a digital recording. It is quite possibly one of the earliest PCM digital recordings ever made for commercial release.

Pires now plays the Yamaha CFIIIS at recitals and in the recording studio, but according to the liner notes the piano used at the time of this recording was a Steinway. The recording itself is a rather experimental affair — digital technology being what it was back then — and I should say upfront that this is not a disc where one can meaningfully discuss audio quality in the usual sense, or speak of the tonal character of Yamaha or Steinway.

In my case, this Pires recording was the very first complete set of Mozart’s piano sonatas I ever encountered as a child. Let me just say it was a most unfortunate introduction. I love Mozart dearly now, but I do think it is hardly surprising if a student handed a record like this for study purposes ends up taking a dislike to playing the music altogether. There is something about listening to it that builds into a tremendous sense of frustration. The dry, shrill sound quality was unpleasant enough, but beyond that, each touch seemed to carry a kind of uniformly pain-laden tone — sunk in a weariness that could only be read as extreme inward world-weariness — with a suffocating quality, as though one were being made to listen to a Bach Passion, as though the inner suffering of Christ bearing the cross were being gouged out from within. This is nothing like Mozart at all, I felt at the time. And yet when I looked through the reviews, I was astonished to find the disc held in extraordinarily high regard. Even so, quite apart from what the wider world made of it, when I listened as a child with whatever purity of instinct I still had, it struck me as an interpretation of Mozart that I simply could not accept on any visceral level.

Now, having reached the same age she was when this recording was made, I have pulled the disc off the shelf and listened again, and things do indeed sound different from those days when nothing but a wholly negative impression remained. I still sense something in the deeper layers — a latent suffering, a kind of frustration — but it is not nearly as intense as it felt in childhood (which no doubt says something about the dulling of my own sensibilities), and rather, it now comes across almost as a powerful personal voice, a distinctive quality that belongs to her as a performer. The extraordinarily delicate and nuanced playing, and the richly detailed interpretation in the pianissimo passages — creating what feels like a vacuum wall between the music and the listener — speak to something quite exceptional in Pires as a pianist. The expressive quality in the inflection and articulation of her emotional world, that interplay between outward technique and inner spirit — it is expressiveness at the visible surface level, one might say, rather than at the deeper layers — and that is what now catches hold of me. Yet that is still a matter of emotional expression alone, and when one digs deeper into what one might call the spiritual dimension, that which seeps out from one’s very humanity… something catches, somewhere, at that level.

As it happens, Pires fell ill some years after this recording and withdrew from performing for a time. This Mozart Piano Sonatas set is a valuable document as a recording from before that withdrawal, but compared with her work today alongside Augustin Dumay on Deutsche Grammophon, she sounds in spirit like an entirely different person. Even in the performances she gave after returning to the stage, there are moments that carry a kind of exhausted, laboured quality, but nothing with quite the same strangely inward, isolated feel as this recording. And when she is at her best, there is a simplicity of touch — like freshly washed white sheets drying in the sun — full of confidence and warmth. One genuinely wonders how it is possible for someone so slight to produce an expression so dynamic; it is astonishing, really.

In particular, at that deeper level beyond technique and emotion — at the spiritual level — I am strongly struck by the sense that something has changed profoundly within her between then and now. It is as though her feeling towards the people who listen to her, and towards herself as a human being, has shifted: from something in which one glimpses an aversion to worldly noise and bustle, towards a love that seeks to share life on equal terms. There is, underlying all of this, her religious sense — she is Portuguese, so presumably Catholic — some orientation towards the divine, and if I may put it this way, it seems as though what was once a solitary purity confined within the framework of religious stricture has moved towards an approach to truth that now carries a greater generosity, one that embraces all living things. Perhaps that is overstating it. But at the very least, as some inner vector within her shifted in that direction, I find myself thinking — as I listen back through the old and new Mozart sonata recordings one by one — that it is from that shift that the empathy and the uniquely poetic, deeply personal touch of today’s Pires have emerged, that quality of imprinting each individual note deep into the listener’s heart.

This is the new recording from 1990. A wonderful performance that never grows stale no matter how many times one returns to it. The recording quality is admirably clear and beautiful — Deutsche Grammophon at its very finest. This is a disc well worth keeping to hand as a reference for the modern interpretation of Mozart’s piano sonatas.

The box set containing all 20 of Pires’s Deutsche Grammophon solo recordings is here