Lots of pianists give Mozart's piano sonatas the kid gloves treatment. They want to respect the lighter tonal character of the instruments of Mozart's time and avoid projecting Beethovenian performance characteristics back onto earlier music. But it's hard to achieve all of this on a 21st-century piano without sounding effete. The music, which can seem so self-evident on the page, is notoriously elusive in performance. Christian Blackshaw plays with a freedom that seems to cast all these difficulties aside. He manoeuvres the music with something of the grace and unpredictability of a bird in flight. But yet the playing lacks nothing in expressive weight. Remarkable. This first volume includes the Sonatas in C, K279, in F, K280, in D, K311, in B flat, K570 and in A minor, K310. url.ie/fa5t