“Nobody plays this music more authoritatively and eloquently,” wrote London’s Sunday Times of Stephen Kovacevich in Beethoven. “He is in his element, responding wholeheartedly to the extreme physicality that Beethoven brought to music … but the wit and delicacy of the playing are also remarkable.”Kovacevich himself has spoken of his love for the “fun and virtuosity” of the composer’s early sonatas, while in the often challenging later works he sees a “subtext of radiance and some sort of inherent faith in life.”

There are many excellent recordings of Mozart's later piano concertos – Perahia, Brendel, Uchida, Casadesus among others – but I want to put a word in for Stephen Kovacevich's accounts with Colin Davis, originally recorded for Philips in the 1970's. He recorded Concertos numbered 20, 21, 23, and 25, and for a while the two discs comprising these performances were available on Philips's Concert Classics budget label, which seems to have been discontinued, but you might be able to pick them up second hand. There's nothing flashy or meretricious about the performances – Davis accompanies with what sounds like a slightly scaled-down London Symphony (he was recording the major Mozart operas in those years) and the outer movements are springy and lithe, and the slow movements played with great feeling, but well within the bounds of classical style.

“Nobody plays this music more authoritatively and eloquently,” wrote London’s Sunday Times of Stephen Kovacevich in Beethoven. “He is in his element, responding wholeheartedly to the extreme physicality that Beethoven brought to music … but the wit and delicacy of the playing are also remarkable.”Kovacevich himself has spoken of his love for the “fun and virtuosity” of the composer’s early sonatas, while in the often