Mozart Piano Concerto No 23 in A major K 488 1st mvt

This is a 1954 recording featuring Denis Matthews (1912-1988) with the Philharmonia Orchestra conductor Rudolf Schwarz

1st movement Allegro

The reviewer in Gramophone for November 1954 wrote:
Yet another Mozart piano concerto from Denis Matthews, this time the famous A major so notoriously difficult to bring off in a recording, or for that matter in performance. Readers who turn up my reviews of three earlier LP performances (Gieseking in December, Clifford Curzon in April, Liii Kraus in May) will find small content with any of them. This new Matthews disc strikes me as the best version available; but I would welcome it with all the reservations made before in the cases of his K.595, 414 and 49, reviewed this month and last. That is to say the performance is a gentle, grisaille one, without much vitality of rhythm or keenness of attack, a tasteful, delicate performance, neatly executed. Matthews uses Mozarts sketch of a cadenza in the first movement, plays the second as written (i.e. without filling in the gaps, as Liii Kraus did), and is so reticent in the finale that some of the notes in arpeggios which should surely sound brilliant disappear altogether. The orchestral support is tidy, pleasant in tone, rather undervitalised. The recording is agreeable, and in accord with the generally subdued effect. A.P.

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