Most of Mozart's single piano pieces are the product of some special stimulus: they aren't the daily bread of music-making, like the sonatas, but something rather more piquant. Christian Zacharias groups the pieces interestingly, starting with a D major-based section: the D minor Fantasia, the D major Rondo, the B minor Adagio and the D major Minuet, as if making a kind of free sonata of them. He omits the Allegretto portion of the Fantasia (on the grounds, it seems, that Mozart left it unfinished), and leads directly from the Fantasia into the Rondo. The B minor Adagio is one of Mozart's darkest, most inward pieces: written at a difficult moment in his life, it invites autobiographical interpretation with its sense of defeat and protest. Zacharias's sombre, subdued performance underlines such thoughts, and in the very chromatic K355 Minuet, too, his playing is dark and impassioned.
The C minor Fantasia, K396, is a rarity: a completion by Maximilian Stadler of a fragment that Mozart wrote for keyboard and violin. One can't imagine a performance much more persuasive than this; and in the authentic C minor Fantasia Zacharias plays beautifully, again with fire in the turbulent sections and with exquisite gentleness in the coolly reflective music such as the B flat episode. The K494 Rondo – more familiar in its revised version as finale of the K533 Sonata – is played in a more relaxed manner; in the A minor Rondo, K511, Zacharias beautifully captures the 'sentimental' tone and provides a performance of great delicacy and refinement, again drawing the full depth of expression from Mozart's harmonic subtleties.