Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos. 24 and 27. - Malcolm Bilson, John Eliot Gardiner, English Baroque Soloists - sound recording reviews

National Review, July 9, 1990 by Ralph De Toledano

Piano Concertos Nos. 24 & 27 The horizontal line was important also to Mozart, but he was too much the virtuoso at the instrument to forget its vertical potential--and it does not take a recording of the Piano Concertos Nos. 24 & 27 by Malcolm Bilson, with the English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner conducting--to tell us so.

Both of these we have heard so often, particularly the No. 24, that the familiarity loses something for us. Are we hearing true, or is the memory filling lapses in the performance that do not exist? This is an "original instruments" reading with Bilson playing the more amenable forte piano which blends with the Mozartean orchestra much better than today's concert grand. But I detect in it a certain lack of fluidity, almost a woodenness, when piano and orchestra come together. (Deutsche Grammophon/Archiv CD 427 652-2.)