Eschenbach knows how to make this music come alive, and even in the rare instances where I find his approach unusual, I have tremendous respect for it. One striking instance of this is in the rondo K. 494 (the last movement of the K. 533 sonata in F). My mental picture of this as a quick, relatively light-hearted movement is entirely different from Eschenbach's; he plays the movement slowly, apparently mindful of the original tempo (Mozart first marked it "Andante" before changing it to "Allegretto" in the edition he published). Eschenbach's reading is very often on the edge of pathos, but I have to admit that it works.
I should also take the opportunity to mention that this set gives a nice bonus with the inclusion of K. 46d and 46e. The liner notes do not make this clear (this is after all a "bargain box"), but these were not originally for piano at all, but rather two-part sonatas for bass and a melody instrument, probably violin, written by Mozart at the age of 12. Eschenbach obviously felt that they were worthy of excavation and gives us a chance to hear these slight but charming works as piano pieces. Since the whole 5 CD set is arranged in chronological order (unlike the bargain box of Andras Schiff's Mozart sonatas on London, this set's closest competitor), one gets to hear the development of Mozart from the boy who wrote the small-scale K. 46d and e to the transcendent genius who concluded his sonata writing with the masterpiece K. 576.
Eschenbach recorded these sonatas between 1967 and 1971, as another reviewer has pointed out. Another famed pianist who was also working on Mozart (or working Mozart over, depending on your perspective!) at the same time was Glenn Gould, recording for Columbia his notorious set of these sonatas. It's too bad Gould, for all his talent, couldn't have gotten over his "Wolfgangophobia" long enough to take a few lessons from Eschenbach in how to value this music and make it sing. As is obvious from this recording, Eschenbach has captured the essence of Mozart, something that completely eluded the celebrated Canadian pianist.
