Golda Vainberg-Tatz, Moscow Chamber Orchestra & Constantine Orbelian - Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos. 20 & 17 (2022)

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Golda Vainberg-Tatz, Moscow Chamber Orchestra & Constantine Orbelian - Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos. 20 & 17 (2022)

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Mozart's Piano Concerto in D Minor, K. 466, is one of only two written in the minor. The key of D minor is highly significant and underlines the tragic character of the concerto. Written in great haste and completed just a day before its premiere, Mozart played the concerto on February 11, 1785, at a subscription concert in Vienna. Mozart’s father, Leopold, wrote to his daughter Anna Maria (Nannerl) after the concert: “Then we had a new and very fine concerto by Wolfgang, that the copyist was still working on when we arrived, and the rondo of which your brother didn’t even have the time to play through, as he had to supervise the copying.”

Mozart wrote the Piano Concerto in G Major, K. 453, in 1784. In a letter to his father dated June 9 of that year, he wrote: “Tomorrow Herr Ployer, the agent, is giving a concert in the country at Dodling, where Fraulein Babette is playing her new concerto in G major and I am performing the quintet (K. 452).” Mozart’s student, Fraulein Babette, was the daughter of a friend from his Salzburg days. The opening tutti presents no less than nine separate thematic ideas along with the principal Mozart Concertos Nos. 20 & 17 second subject. Particular prominence is given to the wind section of flute, oboes, bassoons and horns. Mozart’s immense skill as a composer for the piano is shown in this movement by the rippling scales and chordal arpeggios, which appear in myriad guises. In the operatic, C major Andante second movement, Mozart emphasizes the wind section. The flute, first oboe and first bassoon emerge in leading melodic lines which continue through- out the movement. The piano turns into the role of solo singer in an operatic aria, accompanied by a group of concertante winds. The finale (Allegretto) suggests the atmosphere of a comic opera. The move- ment consists of five variations that are followed by a lengthy coda section. The coda (Presto) is written in the manner of an Opera Buffa finale. The principal theme is reintroduced in the winds, concluding in a finale of great humor and brio.