Vikingur Olafsson disappoints in Mozart & Contemporaries

I greatly enjoyed Vikingur Olafsson's traversals of Bach, and of Rameau and Debussy. So I was an easy customer for his CD of “Mozart and Contemporaries”. A bit disappointed, however. Not everything Mozart wrote was high art (though never perfunctory). On this new CD, I greatly enjoyed the opening track, an andante spiritoso from a sonata by Baldassare Guluppi (who?) Olafsson's arrangement for piano of the adagio from Mozart's string quintet in G minor K 516 just does not work; Mozart knew perfectly well how to write for two violins, two violas, and a cello. The lack of colour when the movement is played on a piano is like seeing a black and white photograph of a Michelangelo painting. And Franz Liszt's transcription of Mozart's Ave verum corpus K 618 is, quite frankly, boring. So, for me, this new CD from Olafsson comes nowhere near the interest of his previous two discs. A shame.