Overture Magazine: 2017-2018 Season FINAL_BSO_Overture_May_June | Page 24

MOZART AND BRAHMS
achieve a perfect balance—a dialogue of
equals — between orchestra and soloist.
Concerto No. 22 was premiered on
December 23, 1785 at a special subscription
concert to open Vienna’s 1785–1786 winter
season. It had been preceded by two of
Mozart’s most unconventional concertos:
No. 20 in D Minor and No. 21 in C
Major. In his guide to the Mozart piano
concertos, Cuthbert Girdlestone surmises
that with this concerto the composer
may have consciously returned to a more
popular, ingratiating style, lest he get too
far ahead of his audience.
Girdlestone has called this work the
“queen” of Mozart’s piano concertos, and
it fills its sovereign length — at about 36
minutes it is one of Mozart’s longest—
with poise, graciousness and a wealth
of melodic and formal invention. Keep
an ear out for Mozart’s superb writing
for the woodwinds, which play a crucial
supporting role to the piano throughout the
piece. For the first time in his concertos,
Mozart employed his favorite clarinets
here to replace the customary oboes.
Undoubtedly, their fruity and sometimes
plaintive tones inspired him to new heights.
The leisurely and expansive first
movement opens with a regal flourish
and then unfurls a wonderful variety
of different melodies. And when the
pianist enters, he hardly bothers with the
orchestra’s themes. Instead, he has plenty of
ideas of his own to introduce and develop,
as well as rivers of rapid passages to show
off his agility. After a short but dramatic
development section, the recapitulation
of the opening music is treated with great
originality. Now the pianist is finally
willing to play the orchestra’s themes, but
only on his own ingenious terms.
The crown of this queen of concertos is
the magnificent C-minor slow movement:
a rueful meditation on life’s sorrows.
There is pain, but not a trace of self-pity
here—rather a calm acceptance that
suffering is part of humanity’s lot. This is
a mood we encounter often in Mozart’s
later music. With the trumpets and
timpani on the sidelines, he separately
spotlights each of his instrumental
families. The strings alone introduce
the poignant theme; the piano, largely
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unaccompanied, varies it; then the
woodwind band introduces the lyrical first
episode. Notice the little stabs of painful
dissonance near the close of the strings’
presentation of the theme.
With the final return of this theme,
Mozart finally unites all his forces in a
dramatic variation topped by keening
woodwinds. The movement’s closing
coda, introduced by the solo clarinet
and bassoon and emphasizing those
stabbing dissonances, is a moment of
indescribable beauty.
With its playful, almost simple-minded
theme, the last movement suggests
it is going to be just another of those
lightweight rondo finales that late-
18th-century audiences loved so well.
But Mozart has some surprises in store,
and the biggest is his interpolation of a
slower-tempo minuet interlude midway
through the movement. This elegant wind-
dominated music returns us partway to the
poignant mood of the second movement.
It also suggests the opera Mozart had just
begun composing, The Marriage of Figaro.
And Mozart has yet a final surprise for the
concerto’s last moment: a trick ending in
which the piano wanders off on one last
flight of fancy.
Instrumentation: Flute, two clarinets,
two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets,
timpani and strings.
SYMPHONY NO. 3 IN F MAJOR
Johannes Brahms
Born in Hamburg, Germany, May 7, 1833;
died in Vienna, Austria, April 3, 1897
Most of the major works of Johannes
Brahms’ maturity were composed in
summertime in beautiful rural settings
overlooking tranquil lakes and alpine
peaks. But during the summer of 1883,
his Third Symphony was written in an
urban location: a lofty studio overlooking
the German Rhineland city of
Wiesbaden. The urge to create this work
had come on the composer while visiting
Wiesbaden, where he decided to stay
rather than lose inspiration traveling to a
vacation retreat. And there was another