Our story begins with a 14-year-old Norwegian boy making his debut with a professional orchestra in Mozart’s D minor Piano Concerto, K466. The experience, he recalls, took him aback: ‘It was a shock to have all this sound so closely around me – it scared me.’ Fast forward to 2007, and he was recording the same piece with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. Though when he listens now to that recording, he isn’t impressed: ‘What I was doing, and what the orchestra was doing, didn’t cohere enough. My playing was flashy, going for effects rather than integrating itself into a bigger drama.’
Fast forward once more to today, and the ruthlessly self-critical Leif Ove Andsnes has recorded this work yet again, and is going to direct it from the keyboard at the Proms. He’s also making it the centrepiece for a multi-faceted project entitled Mozart Momentum, whose origins lie in a similar project which he dubbed The Beethoven Journey, and which had its own off-beat genesis.
ANDSNES HAD BEEN STAYING IN a hotel in Brazil where the lifts played snatches of Beethoven’s First and Second Piano Concertos,
