Mitsuko Uchida
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Independent

27 February 2007

Edward Seckerson

No pianist conveys the rapture of Mozart quite like Mitsuko Uchida does. Inward-looking moments of repose positively levitate under her fingers. On the turn of a single note, she can achieve a kind of weightlessness that can still an entire hall. On the surface of it, it's a question of what pianists might call "touch", but, on a deeper level, Uchida understands better than most the mystical correlation between simplicity and purity in Mozart.

In the first movement of Mozart's extraordinary Piano Concerto No 13 in C - part of an ongoing LSO Mozart Concertos series - there's a moment whose sole purpose is to lead us back to the soloist's very first thematic idea. The turn is elegantly achieved with fewer than a handful of notes, but to infuse them, as Uchida did, with real anticipation, to hold them suspended in time and space as if they were the key to some untold truth, is the difference between serving Mozart the showman and discovering Mozart the romantic.

With Mozart, the secrets are often concealed in the surprises, and Uchida sprang them all with relish. The finale's two minor-key diversions, for instance, are designed to keep us guessing as to whether the merry-making will restart. But with Uchida, there was a real sense that Mozart's games concealed a deeper disquiet. Sublime.