LDV106

17 PHILIPPE CASSARD Oddly enough, the Sonata for piano four hands K497 seems to be ignored by most piano duos. I find that quite incomprehensible, because this grandiose and moving work, every note of which is a jewel, is one of Mozart’s twenty or thirty unquestionable masterpieces. None of his other sonatas for piano four hands can match its wealth of motifs and its depth of thought. The curtain-raising Adagio in unison, which then modulates into the keys most remote from F major, clearly foreshadows Schubert. In the Andante, opera buffa interludes break up duets for sopranos or soprano and mezzo-soprano that are straight out of Figaro or prefigure Fiordiligi and Dorabella. And what skill in stage lighting at the end, when the footlights go out one after the other . . . The whole orchestra is there, deployed on a single keyboard, with its strings (the Figaro overture is quoted almost literally in the development of the first movement), its wind section (the sublime series of thirds in the Andante), its horns, trumpets and drums waiting in ambush. As for the finale, with its ingenuous fake conclusions, its delayed codas, its interrupted cadences, its harmonic audacities, it ends in a general burst of laughter, reminding us just what a master Mozart is at organising festive fireworks.