MOZART PIANO CONCERTO NO. 23
competitive antiphonal singing of China’s
Zhuang minority.
As Chen explains, “For celebrating the
Chinese lunar New Year or Mid-Autumn
Festival, people of the Zhuang minority in
Southern China often gather in the field
and sing mountain songs in solo, choir or
antiphonal forms. In the antiphonal singing,
distinct groups or individuals make up the
texts in the style of antithetical couplets, like
a competition between the two. The vivid
scene has inspired me to write music for
keeping that high spirit and ideal hope alive.
The pitch and rhythmic material in the
piece are taken from mountain song and
a dancing tune of Zhuang, Miao, Yi and
Buyi minority nationalities in Southwestern
China, where I have gone to collect folk
music in the early 80s.”
Though only standard Western
instruments are used, Ge Xu takes us to a
mesmerizingly exotic world. A powerful
use of percussion instruments—including
an exhilarating drum cadenza in the
middle—expresses the competitive force
of the Zhuang competitions. Using the full
dynamic range of the orchestra, including
silences, Chen builds her “vivid scene”
dramatically, then returns to the eerie quiet
with which it began.
Instrumentation: Two flutes including piccolo,
two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four
horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani,
percussion, harp and strings.
PIANO CONCERTO NO. 23 IN A MAJOR
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Born in Salzburg, Austria, January 27, 1756;
died in Vienna, Austria, December 5, 1791
“Mozart essentially invented the classical
piano concerto and then elaborated the
concerto’s potentialities of form and
expression in a series of highly individual
masterpieces. He unveiled a universe and
then devoted himself to populating it with
the most diverse creations,” said Mozart
biographer Maynard Solomon.
Each of Mozart’s concertos is a world
unto itself, and one of the loveliest and
most refined of these worlds is that of
Piano Concerto No. 23, completed on
18
OV E R T U R E / BSOmusic.org
March 2, 1786. Two months earlier, Mozart
had created No. 22, a regal dominion of
trumpets, drums and grandeur. Just three
weeks later came No. 24, a turbulent
pre-Romantic vision. Concerto No. 23 is
altogether different from these neighbors:
an intimate conversation in a drawing room
between close friends.
It is also one of the most vocal of the
concertos. This is not surprising, for
simultaneously Mozart was completing
his vivacious comic opera, The Marriage
of Figaro. Here the soloist is asked not so
much to display his digital dexterity as to
play the great opera singer, especially in the
sublime slow movement.
Concerto No. 23 is also filled with an
emotional quality very characteristic of
Mozart: the mood of smiling through tears.
This is heard best in the first movement,
which sounds outwardly serene but
immediately muddies the waters with its
second chord, containing a dissonant note
troubling the A-major harmony. “The
light…is one of a March day—the month
in which it was composed—when a pale
sun shines unconvincingly through fleeting
showers,” is how musicologist Cuthbert
Girdlestone expressed it. The second theme,
introduced a minute later by the violins, is
rather melancholy and grows more so as a
bassoon and flute join in. As the exposition
wraps up, listen for a quiet, chin-up closing
theme in the strings; from it Mozart will
build an expressive development section.
The soloist opens the second movement
with a poignant melody featuring large
intervals in the manner of a virtuosic
18 th -century diva. The orchestra answers
with a more anguished melody; achingly
beautiful dissonances are created by its
clashing contrapuntal lines. Flutes and
clarinets try to brighten the mood in the
middle section. But the tears persist as the
opening music returns and is capped by a
heartbreaking coda.
The brilliant rondo finale at last dries
all tears. And finally, the pianist can
play the virtuoso as he leads off with the
sparkling rondo theme. But this is just
one of a quiver-full of melodies Mozart
has ready, and he keeps shooting fresh
ones at us in a movement of non-stop
vivacity and invention.
Instrumentation: One flute, two clarinets, two
bassoons, two horns and strings.
SYMPHONY NO. 5 IN B-FLAT MAJOR
Sergei Prokofiev
Born in Sontsivka, Ukraine, April 23, 1891;
died in Moscow, Russia, March 5, 1953
The premiere of Prokofiev’s Symphony
No. 5 in Moscow on January 13, 1945 was
an occasion charged with emotion. The
great Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter vividly
recalled the moment as Prokofiev mounted
the podium: “He stood like a monument on
a pedestal. And then, when [he] had taken
his place…and silence reigned in the hall,
artillery salvos suddenly thundered forth.
His baton was raised. He waited, and began
only after the cannons had stopped. There
was something very significant in this,
something symbolic. It was as if all of us—
including Prokofiev— had reached some
kind of shared turning point.”
Richter’s observation was correct. The
cannons that interrupted the start of
the Fifth Symphony were celebrating the
news that the Soviet Army was crossing
the Vistula River into the territory of Nazi
Germany. The end of World War II was
now in sight. The music that followed this
joyful roar proved worthy of the moment,
and 40 minutes later, the audience set off
its own explosion. For with his longest and
arguably greatest symphony, Prokofiev had
summed up the mood of the Russian people
at this momentous time in their history with
music that paid tribute both to the terrible
suffering they had experienced and to the
victory that would soon be theirs.
Prokofiev, too, had reached a personal
turning point. Since he returned from
the West to the U.S.S.R. in 1936, he had
struggled to adjust to Stalin’s cultural
whims. Now for a brief moment, he
was at the apex of his career: no longer a
suspiciously watched “foreigner,” but the
voice of the Russian people.
Oddly, it had been easier to be a
composer in the Soviet Union during
World War II than in the years before or
after, for Stalin was too busy prosecuting
the war to worry about subversive artists.
Retreats far from the front lines were set