Perhaps the finest pianist that most of the world has never known, Hungarian pedagogue Ferenc Rados, was enticed by his pupil Kirill Gerstein into an extremely rare visit to a studio to record two of Mozart’s sonatas for four hands. The result is an instant collector’s item, if only for the fact that chances to hear the 86-year-old in action are rare.

Mozart
Rados and his Russian-born American protégé had performed the C Major K521 and F Major K497 Sonatas at the Salzburg Mozarteum in 2016, part of which is captured on YouTube, but getting the great teacher of Zoltan Kocsis, András Schiff and members of the Takács Quartet to leave his beloved Budapest for the three-day Berlin studio gig was a major achievement which Gerstein describes vividly in the liner notes. “He [Rados] was relentlessly self-critical. I cannot count the number of times he said, ‘It is best that you take me to the airport now’. Only in retrospect is that hilarious,” Gerstein says.

Both works are masterpieces of the genre – the F Major is almost symphonic...