The Sixth is one of the hardest symphonies to tame. Bychkov leans into the contrasts, the Alma theme glowing with inner fire and a slow movement that shimmers like a limpid Austrian lake.
The Austrian pianist's expressive, emotional playing may grab the headlines, but it's the unerring sense of underlying architecture that's the thread through her long career. We heard that here, not just within each of the works, but in the shared foundations, and sometimes secret connecting passages, she revealed between them.
The sheet is modest in size but immense in significance. Carefully inked across the page are the opening 20 bars of a fugue - not Mozart's own invention, but his transcription of a harpsichord work by George Frideric Handel, composed more than sixty years earlier. Mozart was 26 when he set to work on it in 1782-83, transforming Handel's keyboard fugue into the beginnings of a string quartet arrangement.
