Mozart: Piano Concerti 23 & 24
The mid-1780's were Mozart's most prosperous years. Challenging, serious and often lengthy though his music was, Vienna had found it to its taste. Between his first operatic successes in Vienna--The Abduction from the Seraglio (1782) and The Marriage of Figaro (1786)--Mozart prospered mainly as a composer of chamber music and as the unsurpasses performer of his own piano concertos.In his Vienna years (1781-91) Mozart composed 17 piano concertos. In no order from--symphony, string quartet, sonata--did he produce such a large body of work; along with the German and Italian operas, the piano concertos illuminate the story of MOzart's life as a mature, independant artist.The first few Vienna concertos were works that could be performed with a very small orchestral accompaniments became ever richer and more complicated, and the formal designs of the pieces took on a new depth and individuality. By 1786, when the concertos on this recording were composed, the concerto idea has already undergone a remarkable transformation in MOxart's hands.Mozart by all accounts, was a wonderful interperter of his own music and that of others. Both piano technique itself had not been developed by Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt to the heroic proportation we expect from modern soloists. But it was his glorious musicality, his taste at the keyboard, that his contemporaries noticed, and with which he concerned himself. While others provided flashy sonatas and variations, Mozart busied himself more with coherent musical essays and a style of playing that, as he himself put it, "should flow like oil."Today we say that the difficulty in a Mozart conceto lies in the deceptive simplicity of the solo part. All a pianist's musicality is exposed here, unlike some Romantic concertos where the soloist can get by on glittering effects and grand sonorities designed around the modern, technically perfected, iron-framed piano.