The B-flat Concerto, K. 595, is Mozart’s final work in the concerto form. The Concerto, completed in January 1791, broke a nearly three-year concerto dry spell, the longest period without a new piano-orchestra work since he had settled in Vienna. The year 1784 had been the most productive, with six concertos flying off his writing table.
But the mellow, affectingly reticent B-flat Concerto should not be made to wear a black armband, which, however, has been placed there by Cuthbert Girdlestone in his splendid book, “Mozart and His Piano Concertos”; Girdlestone writes of the Concerto’s “resignation and nostalgia [which] spreads not only a veil of sadness over the whole concerto, [but] also casts on it at times as it were an evening light, announcing the end of a life.”
Here are the sounds of this sad and wonderful concerto:
