Masterful yet unassuming, fortepianist Geoffrey Lancaster serves up a Mozart recital to treasure.

Exquisite keyboard playing gives Papa Joe an elegant polish.

The South African-born, Gold Coast-educated fortepianist talks Mozart and the therapeutic effect of mixing a cocktail. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

In the 1980s the fortepiano specialist was at the cutting edge of a whole new sound that had the skeptics and critics reeling.

Turkish pianist Fazıl Say is known for his virtuosic readings of core classical repertoire. He is also a composer and, in a tradition that has a long history in Western Classical music, incorporating folk influences from his native Turkey. Notoriously, Say was sentenced to a ten-month jail term in 2013 for making allegedly blasphemous comments on Twitter, a charge that was overturned by the Turkish Supreme Court of Appeals in 2015. Today, we find him signed to Warner Classics and turning his attention to the complete piano sonatas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with stunning results. The 18 sonatas and Fantasia in C Minor are grouped on six discs according to key, and were recorded in 2014 in the Great Hall of the Mozarteum Salzburg. For Say, Sonata No 14 in C Minor is the most momentous and a significant influence on Beethoven and Schubert. His playing is utterly assured, precise and crisp, with any potential for brittle timbre alleviated by the recording’s roomy warmth. Mozart’s music “requires us to assimilate it with our own bodies and beings… to live it and breathe it,” according to Say, who was striving for “a certain naturalness” throughout, and his detailed notes on each…

Fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout’s traversal of Mozart’s complete keyboard music is fast becoming one of the most significant recording projects of the 21st century, combining as it does the best contemporary thinking on historical performance practice with an individual and refined musical sensibility. No stranger to Australian audiences, Bezuidenhout is equally at home in an orchestral or solo instrumental context; he is also as much at home with the improvisatory aspects of historical performance as other fortepianists such as Robert Levin and the great Malcolm Bilson. These factors combine to enliven Bezuidenhout’s interpretations in both a colouristic and decorative sense. Even non-specialists will be left utterly convinced of his total fluency in the musical language of the 18th century. And how lovely to open with the deceptively simple C Major Sonata, K545, so familiar to generations of piano students and yet so elegant and ingenious in its writing.  Here, Bezuidenhout’s delicate phrasing, subtle balancing of voices and charming embellishments prepare the listener for what is to come, not only in other familiar works such as the piano sonatas K280, K279 and K576, but some preludes, a neo-baroque dance suite, a couple of allegros completed by Levin and three dazzling sets of…