W.A. Mozart: Violin Concertos, Isabelle Faust, violin

Isabelle Faust’s recording of Mozart’s violin concertos with the period-instrument ensemble Il Giardino Armonico, under its founder-conductor Giovanni Antonini, took the top overall prize at the 2017 Gramophone Classical Music Awards — not just the Concerto category it was nominated in, but Recording of the Year outright, beating every other classical release across every category that year. Released on Harmonia Mundi in 2016, it was praised specifically for the combination of period instruments, a period-informed interpretive approach, and modern studio engineering, a pairing Gramophone’s own judges singled out as unusually well balanced.

About the recordings

Mozart wrote his violin concertos comparatively early, mostly during a single burst of activity in 1775 when he was still in his teens, working as a court musician in Salzburg before his later focus shifted almost entirely to opera, piano concertos and chamber music. Played on period instruments — gut strings, Classical-era bows, an ensemble sized and balanced the way an 18th-century court orchestra actually would have been — the concertos can sound markedly different from the fuller, more sustained tone modern-instrument performances typically bring to them: leaner textures, sharper articulation, and a lighter overall sound that’s closer to what Mozart himself would have heard.

About the performers

Isabelle Faust is a German violinist whose early competition wins — the Leopold Mozart Competition and the Paganini Competition among them — launched a career built on treating historically informed performance and mainstream concert repertoire as a continuum rather than separate specialisms. She performs regularly with major symphony orchestras like the Berlin Philharmonic and Boston Symphony alongside sustained collaborations with period-instrument ensembles, of which this Mozart cycle with Il Giardino Armonico is one example among several. Il Giardino Armonico, founded and directed by Giovanni Antonini, is an Italian period-instrument ensemble built specifically around exactly this kind of historically grounded orchestral playing, giving Faust a genuinely matched partner for the approach rather than a modern orchestra adapting to a soloist’s individual choices.

Why the pairing works

A soloist with a strong personal commitment to period-informed playing gets more out of a genuinely period-instrument ensemble than out of a modern orchestra making occasional historically-informed gestures — the tuning, articulation and balance are shared starting points rather than something the soloist has to negotiate alone. That coherence is likely a real part of why this recording won as decisively as it did: rather than a single strong solo voice set against a conventionally modern-sounding accompaniment, the whole recording works from the same historical premise throughout.

About the programme

The two-disc set covers all five numbered violin concertos, K207, K211, K216, K218 and K219, alongside three shorter companion pieces Mozart wrote for the same forces: the Adagio in E major, K261, and two Rondos, K269 and K373 — occasional pieces likely written as substitute or alternative movements for specific performers, rather than concert works in their own right. Including them alongside the five main concertos gives a fuller picture of Mozart’s writing for solo violin and orchestra across the 1770s than the numbered concertos alone, filling out a body of work that’s smaller and more tightly clustered in time than his later piano concerto output.

A note on this page

This review was written fresh by the mmmusic team to cover a real, current recording — it isn’t part of the archive recovered from the original 1991–2018 shop. It’s new coverage extending the same critical tradition to what’s being recorded and awarded today.