Mozart the Travelling Whirlwind – Mozart: Sonatas Nos. 7, 8, 9; Michael Wessel; ARS Produktion
Reviewed by Rey Andreas 27 March 2026
German pianist Michael Wessel recorded a brand new album of Mozart’s piano sonatas for the ARS label in 2025. Titled Mozart The Travelling Whirlwind, the album options Sonatas Nos. 7, 8, and 9 (Ok 309, 311, and 310, respectively), in addition to a Siciliana and sonata actions (Sonatensätze in German).
Whereas his first sonata is marked as a lot by pianistic virtuosity as by an virtually exuberant pleasure, a few of its eighth notes—significantly in its ultimate motion, Rondeau, Allegretto grazioso—recommend a extra anxious and determined temper. May this exaggerated pleasure, intense in its expression, be nothing greater than a headlong rush?
This hole between the best pleasure and the deepest sorrow, this stress between these two opposing feelings—which continually narrows with out ever closing—reaches its peak in Sonata No. 9, composed in Paris. It will undoubtedly be too straightforward to attribute this sonata to the dying of his mom, which occurred shortly earlier than its composition. Maybe this dying merely offered a possibility for this anxiousness inside Mozart to disclose itself extra overtly….
In any case, the pianist succeeds right here in deciphering these works because the little sisters of Mozart’s most tragic operas—clearly the three operas with Da Ponte, but in addition, earlier, Mitridate and Lucio Silla.
The standard of this recording lies within the interaction—one may even say the interaction—between lightness and gravity, which prevents the previous from changing into frivolous and the latter from changing into too sombre.
All of Mozart is true there…
Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART (1756-1791)
Piano Sonata quantity 7 in C main KV 309 (Mannheim 1777)
Piano Sonata quantity 8 in D main KV 311 (Mannheim 1777/78)
Piano Sonata quantity 9 in A minor KV 310 (Paris 1778)
Taken from the pocket book of the 8 years outdated Mozart:
Sonata motion in G main, KV 15p
Siciliana in D main KV 15u
Sonata motion in B-flat main KV 400 / 372a (1781)
Michael Wessel (piano)
ARS Produktion ARS 38 378 1CD [74:53]
Michael Wessel is professor of piano, tune interpretation and methodology on the College of Church Music in Bayreuth. He studied piano, composition, music concept and faculty music on the music universities of Detmold and Stuttgart, and his academics included Elisabeth Leonskaja and the composer Helmut Lachenmann. Within the years main as much as his dying, Wessel typically sought creative recommendation from the Paul Badura-Skoda, who wrote: “Michael Wessel just isn’t solely a wonderful, delicate pianist, but in addition one of the vital clever musicians I’ve ever met.”
This disc is the fourth of Michael Wessel’s Mozart discs for ARS, every with a selected theme. Earlier discs being Mozart The Poet, Mozart the Double-Confronted and Mozart the Progressive
