Download Wolfgang Mozart Piano Concerto No. 22 in E- -flat

PROGRAM NOTES
by Phillip Huscher
Wolfgang Mozart
Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria.
Died December 5, 1791,
91, Vienna, Austria.
Piano Concerto No. 22 in E--flat Major, K. 482
Mozart entered this concerto in his catalog on December 16, 1785, and played the solo part at the first
performance on December 23 in Vienna. The orchestra consists of flute, two clarinet
clarinets,
s, two bassoons, two
horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings. Mozart left no cadenzas for this concerto. Mr. Barenboim plays
his own cadenza in the first movement and an arrangement of one by Edwin Fischer in the third
movement. Performance time is appro
approximately thirty-four minutes.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first subscription concert performances of Mozart’s Twenty-second
Twenty
Piano Concerto were given at Orchestra Hall on March 14 and 15, 1924, with Wanda Landowska as
soloist and Frederick Stock conducting.
ucting. Our most recent subscription concert performances were given
on February 11, 12, and 13, 1999, with Daniel Barenboim conducting from the keyboard. The Orchestra
first performed this concerto at the Ravinia Festival on July 9, 1955, with Rudolf Serk
Serkin
in as soloist and
Eduard van Beinum conducting, and most recently on July 24, 2005, with Emanuel Ax as soloist and
James Conlon conducting.
Mozart wrote three piano concertos while he worked on The Marriage of Figaro during the winter of 17851785
86. This was the most productive period in his life, and the only reasonable way to explain the enormous
and varied output of these six months is to assume that the intense work on the complicated musical and
dramatic structures of the opera set his mind racing with m
more ideas than a single four-act
act opera could
contain. Neither the challenge of the purely mechanical task of writing it all down, nor the infinitely greater
one of conceiving so much glorious music, appears to have inconvenienced Mozart in the least.
Throughout
ghout the winter, he kept to his regular routine of teaching and performing, while also maintaining a
full social calendar. The only activity that seems to have suffered was his correspondence, and so we
have only a sketchy account of his daily life at the time.
Mozart’s piano concertos were his main performing vehicles
vehicles—as
as well as his primary source of income.
From 1782, the year after he moved to Vienna, until 1786, Mozart wrote fifteen piano concertos—an
concertos
incredible outpouring of important music that corr
corresponds,
esponds, not coincidentally, to his heyday as a
performer. When Leopold Mozart visited Wolfgang in Vienna early in 1785, he saw that his son’s life was
a whirlwind of public appearances, complicated immeasurably by the convention of hauling one’s own
instrument
ument along to each performance. “Since my arrival,” he wrote to Nannerl, “your brother’s fortepiano
has been taken at least a dozen times from the house to the theater or to some other house.”
There are passages for the piano in the E
E-flat major concerto he wrote that hectic Figaro winter that are
not fully written out, because Mozart was then, more than ever, short of time. (Besides, he composed the
concerto expressly for his own use.) Those fragmentary measures speak not of carelessness, but merely
impatience;
tience; they also remind us that Mozart regularly improvised and ornamented certain phrases as he
played.
The three concertos of the Figaro winter are Mozart’s first to include clarinets, his favorite wind
instrument, and they dominate the E
E-flat work as they do no other piano concerto. (It is the first concerto
to have been conceived with clarinets in mind; the next in the series, K. 488, was actually begun earlier,
but with oboes instead; Mozart switched to clarinets when he completed the score in 1786.)
1786. In fact, the Eflat concerto is saturated with the sound of woodwinds; even the bassoon often catches the ear with ripe
melodic interjections.
The first movement benefits from the exceptional richness and variety of Mozart’s scoring, for its primary
material is little more than boilerplate ceremonial music, decked out with fanfares and trumpet-and-drums
heroics. Yet at every turn, Mozart invests anonymous gestures with personality and interest. Listen, for
example, to the opening six measures, with its horn duet answered by bassoons; Mozart then repeats the
passage, giving the duet to clarinets, and the response not to another of the winds, but to the violins. The
entire movement is enlivened by that kind of careful, imaginative detail. As always in Mozart’s concertos,
the interplay between instruments, and between piano and orchestra, suggests the intimacy of chamber
music; here the effect is heightened in particular by the number of wind solos.
The first Viennese audience applauded the C minor Andante so insistently that Mozart played it again. It
is one of his finest slow movements, launched by a simple, yet indescribably poignant theme. Mozart
writes three increasingly elaborate variations on the opening theme, the first two for the piano with only
the most discreet accompaniment. Around the second variation, Mozart wraps two episodes, one for
winds alone, the other a duet for flute and bassoon. The final variation is expansive and dramatic,
surprising in its details—listen for the glint of C major in a C minor world—and endlessly complicated in its
emotional progress.
The finale begins as genial hunting music, only to have the hunt frozen in place by the interjection of a
courtly minuet, with its wistful echoes of the Andante and still more glorious writing for the winds. This
mixture of ballroom and sunny outdoors, of high spirits and quiet introspection, is typically Mozartean, and
it gives the finale an unexpected depth.
Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
© Chicago Symphony Orchestra. All rights reserved. Program notes may be reproduced only in their
entirety and with express written permission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
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change without notice.