How marvellous to have, some years after his false start to a complete recording of Mozart’s piano sonatas with Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, that doyen of fortepianists, Robert Levin, return to the project for ECM – on Mozart’s own piano, no less.
Levin’s chief competitors here are the fiery Ronald Brautigam, who plays an instrument by Paul McNulty after a c.1795 Anton Walter; and the suave Kristian Bezuidenhout, who plays a copy of an 1805 Viennese model. But this is the real thing: a 1782 Walter, which Mozart owned and played between 1785 and 1791, and which now lives in his former family home in Salzburg.

It’s a beautiful instrument (I was fortunate enough to see and hear it some years ago), small, with leather rather than felt-covered hammers and a delicate action. Its sound is almost ghostly yet toothsome and present, perfectly suited to Mozart’s apparent approach to articulation, a carry-over from harpsichord technique. On Mozart’s style of playing, which was according to contemporary accounts characterised by elegance and spontaneity: in a 1777 letter, Meuller von Asow describes one Mozart performance as “so...