Pianist Hélène Grimaud’s only Mozart recordings were nine and ten years ago. As if there was no place for the Salzburg composer in her multifaceted oeuvre. And indeed, explains Grimaud, she used to leave the “lightness of being” with which she associated Mozart’s piano work unsatisfied. Now, however, The Messenger appears , Mozart enters into a pianistic dialogue with a composer of our time, the Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov, through the interpreter. Again Grimaud presents a concept album, released on Deutsche Grammophon.

The recording – made with the Camerata Salzburg – was made at the beginning of 2020 at a place where Mozart himself worked, in the Great University Hall in Salzburg. You can hear Mozart’s unfinished Fantasy “KV 397,” the famous piano concerto “KV 466” and his “Fantasy KV 475.” The pieces can be heard on The Messenger in the order of their composition, the structural and dramatic complexity increasing from one to another. And there is something else that distinguishes them: they are among the few works in Mozart’s extensive oeuvre that are in a minor key. Mozart’s confrontation with destiny and providence signifies this tone set, says Grimaud and states that Mozart is more than an Apollonian idiom: “It took me many years of inner development to recognize the full extent of the urgent, unpredictable turbulence that creates transcendental beauty wash away.”

In Silvestrov’s work, Mozart’s music finds “Answer and Echo”, a principle of Silvestrov’s art of composition. It is music that makes use of the stylistic devices of bygone eras and brings them into a new context, but it has “gone through the processes of the 20th century,” as the musicologist Dorothea Redepenning explains. In “The Messenger,” which was recorded for this recording both in the version for string orchestra and piano and in the version for piano solo, Mozartian motifs are freely associated. Like a messenger, it establishes a connection between the world that once existed and the present. Silvestrov wrote the deeply sad piece in memory of his late wife Larissa Bondarenko; in Grimaud’s slow game it is as if she were listening to Silvestrov’s longing memories. Grimaud also recorded Silvestrov’s “Two Dialogues with Postscript. “She interprets this work from 2001, in which Schubert and Wagner echo, with a cautiously soft intensity.

As a composer, Silvestrov saw himself as “a damper on the piano”, as a filter that picks up on and transforms something from already existing music. This is how Hélène Grimaud sees her role as a piano interpreter. She sees herself as a “medium, as a mediator between composer and listener.” With this album, however, she also thinks about herself as an artist and about what is changing. While Silvestrov preserves the past in the present, says Grimaud, Mozart foreshadows the future. On The Messenger she plays music that captures one possibility in life: that of change.