Alexander Kniazev, Edouard Oganessian - Mozart: Cello Sonatas, Vol. 1 (2005)

Customarily, the booklet notes for recordings containing music transcribed for instruments other than those for which it was written make the argument that such transcriptions were normal, accepted, and so on, in the years when the music was written. The ones for this disc make the same argument, but it's not so relevant in this case -- the musicians here join performance style to transcription in an effort to make something new, not just to fill a hole in the cellist's repertory (Mozart never wrote anything for solo cello). The transcriptions from Mozart's sonatas for violin and keyboard were made by cellist Alexander Kniazev, but it is pianist Edouard Oganessian who sets the tone for much of the music: Mozart, in these three violin sonatas, did much to anticipate the violin from its accompanimental role, but there are still lengthy passages in which the piano is alone. And Oganessian's tone is Romantic and tumultuous. In a piano sonata it would come off as too much, but combined with the unexpected cello sound it works; the cello thickens the music and lets it stand up to Oganessian's expressive playing. The results are mixed. The opening movement of the Sonata in G major, K. 379, with its already dramatic slow introduction (mislabeled in the tracklist), reveals an unexpected cousin to the very Beethovenian Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor. But the second movement of the same sonata, a hastily written little variation set that needs to be artless if it's going to work at all, seems a bit overwrought. The same pattern repeats itself throughout the disc, although less extremely than in K. 379; the larger sonata-form movements hold up and even expand in Kniazev's treatments, while the smaller ones lose their modest dimensions. The disc is recommended to those who like Mozart and the cello and want to hear them together -- but they should know that they're going to get some music that sounds a good deal like Beethoven.