Piano Sonatas Nos. 1-6 Roberto Prosseda

• 1 1. Allegro 06:54
• 2 2. Andante 07:27
• 3 3. Allegro 04:41
• 4 1. Allegro assai 06:16
• 5 2. Adagio 08:14
• 6 3. Presto 04:17
• 7 1. Allegro 06:25
• 8 2. Andante amoroso 06:56
• 9 3. Rondeau (Allegro) 04:43
• 10 1. Adagio 06:48
• 11 2. Menuetto I-II 03:54
• 12 3. Allegro 03:05
• 13 1. Allegro 05:37
• 14 2. Andante 06:48
• 15 3. Presto 06:03
• 16 1. Allegro 06:55
• 17 2. Rondeau en Polonaise (Andante) 04:12
• 18 3. Tema con variazione 15:07
• 19 First draft (fragment) of the first movement of the Sonata KV 284 (205b) 02:10
• Total Runtime 01:56:32

Info for Piano Sonatas Nos. 1-6

In 2016, Decca releases the first album of Prosseda's complete recording of Mozart's Piano Sonatas. The first release (April 2016) includes the first 6 Sonatas, from K 279 to K 284. Prosseda chose to play Mozart on a Fazioli F 278 piano, tuned with the Vallotti unequal temperament. This particular tuning was quite common in Moazrt's time, but is today very rarely used on modern pianos. It gives each key a unique colour and makes the performance particularly sensitive to the harmonic changes.

Is there really any need for yet another recording of Mozart’s sonatas? Is it still possible to say something new when playing these compositions while maintaining respect for the score and for the composer’s indications? If Mozart were alive today, would he prefer to perform his sonatas on a fortepiano of the time or on a modern piano?

These are questions to which it is not possible to give an unequivocal answer, but on which I have reflected a great deal, also profiting from the availability of the sources and of many recent philological studies. In the letter to his father cited earlier, written on 17 October 1777, Mozart declared his enthusiasm for a new Stein piano that he had tried out, which was provided with a rudimentary system for working the dampers (corresponding to the right pedal on modern instruments). Referring to the sonata in D he said that it “has an incomparable effect on Stein's pianos. The pedals, pressed by the knees, are also better made by him than by any one else; you scarcely require to touch them to make them act, and as soon as the pressure is removed not the slightest vibration is perceptible.” This shows Mozart’s curiosity about innovations and his readiness to experiment with instruments that provided greater expressive variety.

Nowadays it is possible to consult the manuscripts of the first six sonatas, currently held at the Biblioteka Jagiellońska in Kraków, and there are various critical editions that compare the manuscript version with the first published editions. On looking at the scores one is struck by the large number of original articulation marks, which we do not find so abundantly in the subsequent sonatas. I have tried, therefore, to observe the original phrase marks and dynamics attentively, even in cases in which tradition has accustomed us to softer sounds and smoother contours. It is from those phrase marks and the different kinds of staccato (dots or wedges) that one can deduce how Mozart imagined that a musical phrase should be “pronounced”. The dynamic signs, here apparently limited to forte and piano (occasionally crescendo or decrescendo, and very occasionally pianissimo), also reveal a poetic world in which contrasts are fundamental for the definition of suitable expressive variety.

In order to render those intentions as well as possible I needed a particularly sensitive instrument with a different sonority from the usual “artificial” sound of the modern piano. Therefore I considered recording the sonatas on fortepianos of Mozart’s time and I tried out several historical instruments and some recent copies. Practising with the fortepiano has been of great importance for me. It has enabled me to discover sounds and manners of expression that have allowed me to enter more deeply into Mozart’s world and to enrich my imagination in terms of timbre. However, I have had to recognise that my “mother tongue” is still the modern piano, an instrument that I have been playing for nearly 40 years and one with which I am able to give immediate expression to a greater variety of musical intentions.

So I decided to use a Fazioli concert grand built in 2015, generously made available by Paolo Fazioli at the Fazioli Concert Hall in Sacile. The very refined mechanism of this instrument and the sensitivity of the soundboard, particularly responsive to differences of touch, make it possible to obtain many nuances of colour, clearly rendering differences in articulation. It is also possible to play with microdynamics even in contexts of extreme rapidity, such as in trills or short phrases, and to perform the original forte-piano indications, i.e., a sudden dynamic shift in a held note. The idea of recreating the transparency of the fortepiano sound led me to reduce the use of the sustaining pedal to the minimum and to seek sounds verging on silence in the rare cases in which Mozart indicates pianissimo.

The particular colour of recordings on a fortepiano is also determined by the historical tuning, which does not use equal temperament. Prompted by a suggestion given by my friends Jan Willem de Vriend and Stuart Isacoff, to whom I am most grateful for their valuable advice, I asked Fazioli to tune the piano in accordance with the “Vallotti” unequal temperament, quite unusual nowadays on the modern piano but very widespread in the years when Mozart composed these sonatas. The difference from the normal modern tuning lies in the different colour that each key acquires as a result of dividing the octave into twelve unequal semitones. Thus each sonata has a quite particular character, and it is understandable why Mozart set certain movements in a particular key. For example, the F minor of the Adagio in Sonata K 280 here takes on a decidedly grief-stricken tone, not just one of melancholy. And when, after the opening passage, we come to the section in A flat major, it sounds more precarious and illusory, suggesting the idea of a happiness only imagined, very far from reality.

In the transitions from one key to another, regardless of whether they occur abruptly or gradually, this makes it much easier to capture the shift from one harmonic (and emotional) setting to another much more convincingly. The dissonant harmonies sound much more jarring and “distressing”, emphasising the dramatic and visionary capability that is already present in these early sonatas and that makes them, nearly 250 years later, music of great power and modernity. (Roberto Prosseda)

Roberto Prosseda, piano

Roberto Prosseda
born in Latina, Lazio, in 1975, is one of the most active and versatile Italian musicians on the current international scene. He gained international fame following his recordings of the complete Mendelssohn piano music (Decca, 2005-14), published in a box set in 2017.

Over the past twenty years Roberto has performed with some of the world’s leading orchestras and conductors. With the Gewandhausorchester and Riccardo Chailly, he recorded Mendelssohn’s then-unpublished E minor piano concerto. In Italy he is a regular guest at the major concert venues, including the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Teatro alla Scala, Unione Musicale in Turin, Teatro La Fenice, Accademia Chigiana (Siena) and Teatro Comunale (Bologna).

Roberto is particularly acclaimed for his interpretations of Mozart, Schubert, Schumann and Chopin. His six albums of Mozart piano sonatas for Decca have received considerable international acclaim. In 2022 Roberto completed a project to record the complete Mozart piano works. 2025 saw the release on Hyperion of War Silence, a collection of rare Italian piano concertos by Guido Alberto Fano, Luigi Dallapiccola, Silvio Omizzolo and Cristian Carrara, described in Gramophone magazine as ‘an absorbing listen’.

Since 2011 Roberto has also played the pedal piano in public, having re-discovered and presented in modern premieres various pieces by Alkan and Gounod’s Concerto for pedal piano and orchestra with Parma’s Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini. He has performed the latter also with the Berliner Symphoniker, Staatskapelle Weimar, Lahti Symphony and Netherlands Symphony orchestras, and for Hyperion recorded Gounod’s four pieces for pedal piano and orchestra with the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana and Howard Shelley. Roberto has performed on the piano pedal in over 100 concerts, contributing to the revitalization of the instrument and its repertoire.

Roberto Prosseda is equally active as a music writer and author of radio and TV projects, as well as a creator of innovative musical programmes of international scope. He conceived three television documentaries, about Mendelssohn, Chopin and Liszt, directed by Angelo Bozzolini, produced by RAI and globally distributed by EuroArts. His book Il Pianoforte, a listening guide to piano repertoire, was published by Edizioni Curci in 2013.

This album contains no booklet.