Concert & Tickets

Programme note

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto in A major, K488 (1786)

Allegro
Adagio
Allegro assai

There was a time - not much more than half a century ago - when K488 was one of the few Mozart piano concertos regularly played in Britain. Today it remains a special favourite, adored for the poise and beauty of its first movement, the forlorn expressiveness of its adagio, the inspired prattle of its finale. Composed in tandem with The Marriage of Figaro in 1786, it is the product of one of Mozart’s greatest Viennese years, during which he wrote two other piano concertos, the ‘Prague’ symphony, much fine chamber music and, for a celebration at the palace of Schonbrunn, his pithy operatic send-up entitled The Impresario.

Innovatively, the concerto’s orchestration, though lightweight, included a pair of clarinets, instruments Mozart associated with Vienna and his friend Anton Stadler and had employed in only one previous concerto. Apprehensive that orchestras might not have clarinets available, he interestingly suggested that a solo violin and viola could substitute for them. Yet much of the mellifluous sweetness of the music is dependent upon their presence and on the absence here of more nasal oboe tone. Sweetness, however, does not preclude sadness, which sometimes darkens the pearly melodic interplay between soloist and orchestra in the first movement.

On the other hand, the stark simplicity of the adagio, Mozart’s last of its kind in a minor key (not, it must be said, that he wrote many such), sounds like uninterrupted tragedy. The pulse is that of a very slow siciliano, the Sicilian rhythm of a gently rocking boat, much used in baroque operas and concertos, but greatly savoured by Mozart also, especially in this work. Yet the music looks forward, as well as backwards, anticipating Pamina’s lament in The Magic Flute, though containing none of that aria’s elaborate decorations. Whether or not the soloist chooses to insert any of his or her own, or to leave Mozart’s bare lines and huge, slow leaps to speak for themselves, the music has an operatic intensity highlighted by the closing bars, with their softly insistent, curiously disturbing pizzicato strings.

To this mood of desolation, the mercurial wit and audacious modulations of the finale are the perfect antidote. The scale passages here are no ordinary scale passages, but Mozartian comedy at its most sublimely zany and merrily audacious. At the same time, the entire work has a strangely spectral quality. In the words of one observer, it is a fragile structure of glass, through which the piano itself is often heard only faintly.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Grosse Fuge for strings, Op 133 (1825)

There was a time when Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, like his Missa Solemnis and the choral finale of his Ninth Symphony, was deemed too daunting for human performance. If the worst came to the worst the symphony could end, as sometimes happened in Britain, with its slow movement. To circumvent the problems of the ‘great fugue’, on the other hand, Beethoven supplied his own solution. Persuaded by his publisher that the fugue was too incomprehensible to form the finale of his big B-flat String Quartet, Op 130, he wrote something shorter and wittier instead, allowing the fugue to stand alone as Op 133.

Under its own name it proved no easier to play, but performers gradually accepted the challenge. Though Beethoven himself had declined to attend its original premiere, exclaiming “cattle!” and “asses!” when told that the audience had failed to demand an encore, his willingness to provide a substitute movement suggests that he was aware how formidable the fugue actually was. Yet a sense of strain was, and still is, a vital element of the music. Not even Hans von Bulow’s solution, which was to get a string orchestra to give the music some ballast, could wholly conceal its difficulties.

Today, most performers can take it in their stride, frequently restoring it to its original place as the finale of Op 130, yet its modernity remains startling. Based on a four-note motif with which Beethoven became obsessed while writing his last quartets, it is almost a fifteen-minute quartet, or set of variations, in itself, in which four recognisable movements are packed into one. So there is an ‘Overture’ - really five miniature, disjointed overtures - out of which the fugue springs with a relentlessly violent, jerky counter-subject. The succeeding slow section is more flowing, but nervous energy erupts again in a sort of scherzo where the motif is heard in a context of trills, employed as a source of power rather than decoration. From here the music becomes increasingly fragmented, and quicker in its changes of mood as it moves towards its close.

© Conrad Wilson