Mozart Piano Concertos Nos. 20 & 23

For her tenth album on Sony Classical, Khatia Buniatishvili joins an iconic orchestra in performances of two cherished piano concertos by Mozart, her first ever album dedicated to the composer. The recording will be released on October 4, 2024. Listen here. 

After a string of releases on Sony Classical that have redefined the parameters of the classical recital album, Khatia Buniatishvili is returning to tradition with a recording of two of Mozart’s most sublime late piano concertos.  

In his Piano Concertos Nos 20 and 23, Mozart takes the genre of the concerto to new heights of sophistication and communicative power. The works come from the cherished crop of late piano concertos that are among the jewels of Mozart’s output and have long formed touchstone works for great pianists and recording artists.  

Mozart’s music, says Buniatishvili, carries ‘a simplicity that makes you lost before finding yourself.’ She is joined on her recording by an orchestra with a near-unrivalled pedigree in Mozart recording, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. 

Mozart wrote his first piano concerto at the age of 11 in the 1767. But everything changed in 1781 when the composer moved to Vienna and encountered a discerning public eager to hear piano concertos of increasing scope and variation. 

The composer’s Piano Concerto No 20, dating from 1785, is not just the first he wrote in a minor key, it is the first to truly explore the properties that would make Mozart’s later concertos such masterpieces. This thrilling, changeable score forms the turning point in the composer’s project to reimagine the piano concerto as more than a superficial entertainment; to engage audiences in serious reflection and ensnare them with stories of drama, conflict, joy and loss. It is filled with the smouldering tensions of the composer’s iconic opera Don Giovanni, which launches with an imposing, troubled overture in the same key as the concerto, D minor. 

The concerto’s key of D minor carries particular import for the Georgian pianist. ‘D minor has always been my favourite in Mozart’s music,’ Buniatishvili says, referring to the sophisticated way in which the composer hides the comic inside the tragic in works including the opera Don Giovanni. ‘It is the unbearable heaviness of a pain transformed into a sigh of relief, which weirdly, resembles happiness,’ she says, drawing comparison with the late Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  

A year after his D minor concerto, in March 1786 Mozart wrote his Piano Concerto No 23, a score filled with the spirit of another of the composer’s operatic masterpieces, Le nozze di Figaro, written at the same time. In this bold, spontaneous piece the sense of conversation is deepened further still, with instruments including the solo piano appearing as characters with distinct personalities vying for attention. It contains a sublime slow movement in the ‘black pearl’ key of F sharp minor. 

After strong statements in the music of Liszt, Schubert, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Mussorgsky and the folk music of her native Georgia, Buniatishvili is well placed to put her formidable pianism and fearless musical imagination in the service of Mozart’s singular combination of the human and the divine. Her recording also includes the composer’s so-called ‘sonata facile’ or ‘little sonata for beginners’ - a work whose outward simplicity enshrines a playful introduction to the art of composition. It was written in 1788, three years before the composer died, and only published after his death. Again, it occupies a telling key in Mozart’s oeuvre: the pure and radiant C major.  

Buniatishvili recorded her album at Air Studios in London with the famed Academy of St Martin in the Fields - the orchestra whose recordings of operas, symphonies and concertos by Mozart under its music director Sir Neville Marriner became classics and which recorded the 13 Gold Disc-winning soundtrack to the iconic film Amadeus.  

Khatia Buniatishvili is one of classical music’s true one-offs, a pianist with almost unequalled delicacy of touch and a film-director’s ear for focus-pulling and storytelling. She was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1987 and studied at the University of the Arts in Vienna.  

A former BBC New Generation Artist and protégé of Martha Argerich, Buniatishvili is a preferred collaborator of top-drawer musicians including Renaud Capuçon, Zubin Mehta, Paavo Järvi and Gidon Kremer - and has recorded with all four.  

She signed to Sony Classical in 2010 and has now released ten albums on the label - including the concept albums Motherland and Labyrinth - all of which have ignited conversations on interpretation, presentation and repertoire.  

Khatia Buniatishvili will play Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos 20 and 23 around the world in the coming season, including, in December 2024, as part of her residency at the Barbican Centre in London, where she will be joined by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields.