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‘The sonatas in A, B flat, and D are the ones I wanted to record right
at the start of the series. I’ve always loved them, and they’re the
three sonatas I’ve played most. I was very young when I started to
work on the A major Sonata. It’s one of the first I played. It’s rather
as if I grew up with it. I have the impression I’ve always known
it by heart – I’ve been playing it for nearly eighty-five years now.
The others came a bit later, when I was already a teenager.’
Theworks chose themselves, then. In any case, the Sonata inAmajor – no.11, K331 –
was a natural enough choice. It was long believed to have been composed in Paris
in the spring of 1778, but nowadays is thought to date from a few years later, from
Mozart’s stay in Salzburg in the summer of 1783. The Sonatas in B flat – no.17, K570 –
and in D – no.18, K576 – are the last two Mozart completed, in February and July
1789 respectively. Both were written in Vienna, on either side of a journey that took
him to Prague, Dresden, Leipzig, and Berlin between 8 April and 4 June.
24 MOZART_Piano Sonatas K331, 570 & 576