CD Review | Israelievitch & Petrowska Quilico: Mozart Sonatas

Mozart: Complete Sonatas & Variations for Piano & Violin

Jacques Israelievitch, violin; Christina Petrowska Quilico, piano

Parma Records, 2025

Jacques Israelievitch made this recording of Mozart’s sonatas with Christina Petrowska Quilico in the wake of a cancer diagnosis. The recordings have recently been released by Parma Records to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Israelievitch’s death. While this album is a beautiful testament to the duo’s friendship, I do not think that these recordings are particularly strong from a purely musical point of view, especially when compared to the many great recordings of Mozart sonatas that already exist.

Mozart wrote many sonatas for violin and piano—35 to be exact—all of which are musically demanding. They aren’t particularly technically difficult; later Romantic sonatas, for example, will generally be harder to get one’s fingers around. Still, Mozart’s music is full of twists and turns, of playful rhetorical devices that demand careful attention to articulation and phrasing.

While Israelievitch’s phrasing is often very artful, it is not sufficiently supported by Petrowska Quilico’s piano playing. For example, in the Andante of Sonata 32 in B-flat major, the violin plays a short melodic line that is picked up by the piano. Here, the violin and piano phrasing do not match up: Israelievitch plays his line with a sorrowful diminuendo, while Petrowska Quilico responds rather squarely. She also misses several opportunities to present Mozart’s musical ideas in a clear and refreshing way. Cadences are rushed through which leads to an overall lack of structural unity as it is not clear when one section ends and another begins.  

Israelievitch plays with an old-world aesthetic, marked by a lot of vibrato and an imperfect intonation which sometimes serves the emotional character of the work. There were instances though, when old-world imperfection slips into being just plainly out of tune.