While Mozart’s D-Minor Concerto makes its stormy intentions clear from the very beginning, 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.
The piano comes in with a quiet theme, which the orchestra attempts repeatedly to banish. The battle is unceasing, and there is no victor. The tension remains to the end, unresolved.
The only thing predictable about the slow movement is that it will provide graceful, lyric contrast. But it does so with qualms. At midpoint, Mozart intrudes on the calm, B-flat song with a presto outburst in G minor, jolting listener and performer from their reverie, with the soloist forced to race up and down the keyboard with a degree of virtuosity elsewhere in Mozart restricted to the outer movements of a concerto.
In the Finale, the piano announces the theme and then gives way to a rich, long development in the orchestra. In the end, we get the re-entry of the piano, with some particularly lovely interchanges with the winds.
Here is Mozart’s D-Minor concerto, and the soloist is pianist Christopher Park, with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra:
