A little baby was born 265 years ago today! His name was Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. I listened to his musical masterpiece, and as popular as it is, I am still blown away by its lyricism, orchestration, and beauty.
Mozart’s concerto KV. 466 was introduced to the world at one of his subscription concerts.
The success of the Concerto on February 11, 1785 was considerable, based in no small part on the composer’s playing of the demanding solo, the entire presentation made additionally amazing by the fact that the ink was still wet on some of the orchestral parts until an hour before the performance.
While the Concerto makes its stormy intentions clear from the start, it does not state its principal theme at the outset; rather, there are a few bars of murmurous, agitated, syncopated swirlings in the violins and violas, with stabbing cellos and basses, until the tension explodes – for the first of several times in this turbulent music – in a volley for the entire orchestra. The piano comes in with a quiet, almost frightened-sounding theme, which the orchestra attempts repeatedly to banish. The battle is unceasing, and there is no winner.
The slow movement provides a graceful, lyric contrast. But it does so with some contrasts: At midpoint, Mozart introduces a B-flat song with a cyclonic presto outburst in G minor, jolting the listener from his rest with the soloist forced to race up and down the keyboard with a degree of virtuosity usually restricted to the outer movements of a concerto.
In the Finale, the piano here announces the theme and then gives way to a rich, long development in the orchestra. Here it’s all fire and fangs, before the re-entry of the piano, with some particularly lovely interchanges with the winds.
Listen now to this amazing work as performed by Nikolai Lugansky:
