Mozart: Piano Conc No 23 in A + No 24 in C min - KarazwLaimoon

Music Club: Wednesday 12 November 2014 (7 pm)

Title: Piano Concertos (VIDEO)
No 23 in A major K488 and No 24 in C minor K491
Composer: Mozart
Performers:
No 23: Maurizio Pollini (Piano)
  Karl Bohm (Conductor)
  Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
No 24: Sung-Hoon Kim (The Leeds Competition 2006)
  Lyn Fletcher (Conductor)
  The Halle Orchestra
Facilitator: Akram Najjar

In March 1786, Mozart was in a turbulent situation. He was completing The Marriage of Figaro, his daughter had died a few months earlier and he was deeply in debt. Yet, in the span of 1 month, he wrote two most contrasting works. The K488 is in A major: a bright lyrical concerto. The K491 is in C minor: dark, moody and deep.

Mozart: (adapted from Wikipedia Click Here)
Mozart already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. At 17, he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg, but grew restless and travelled in search of a better position, always composing abundantly. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in Vienna where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas.

He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers, and his influence on subsequent Western art music is profound; Beethoven composed his own early works in the shadow of Mozart, and Joseph Haydn wrote that "posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years."

Interesting Links about Mozart:
Click Here (Britannica)
Click Here (Classical Archives)
Click Here (Biography)
Click Here (Classical.net)
Click Here (Naxos)

Concerto No. 23 in A major K488 (adapted from Wikipedia Click Here):
The concerto has three movements:

1) Allegro in A major and common time.
2) Adagio in F-sharp minor and 6/8 time (in later editions, the tempo is listed as Andante).
3) Allegro assai in A and alla breve (in later editions, the tempo is Presto), in Rondo form.

The first movement is in sonata allegro form. It begins with a double exposition, the first played by the orchestra, the second when the piano joins in. The first is static from a tonal point of view and is concise, the third theme is not yet revealed. The second includes the soloist and is modulatory. It also includes the unheard third theme. The second exposition is ornamented as opposed to the first exposition. The second theme has harmonic tension expressed by dissonances played on the beat then solved by an interval of a descending second. This is also expressed in the use of chromatics in the melody and bass lines which is a source of harmonic tension, as the listeners anticipate the arrival of the tonic.
The second, slow movement, in ternary form, is somewhat operatic in tone. The piano begins alone with a theme characterized by unusually wide leaps. This is the only movement by Mozart in F sharp minor. The dynamics are soft. The middle of the movement contains a brighter section in A major announced by flute and clarinet that Mozart would later use to introduce the trio "Ah! taci ingiusto core!" in his opera Don Giovanni.
The third movement is a rondo. It is shaded by moves into other keys as is the opening movement (to C major from E minor and back during the secondary theme) and with a central section whose opening in F sharp minor is interrupted by a clarinet tune in D major.

Concerto No. 24 in C minor K491 (adapted from Wikipedia Click Here):
Ludwig van Beethoven loved this concerto. He told his friend, Cramer, "we shall never be able to do anything like that." The concerto has the following three movements:

1) Allegro in C minor (3/4 time)
2) Larghetto in E-flat major (cut time)
3) Allegretto (Variations) in C minor (cut time)

It is one of only two minor-key piano concertos (the other being No. 20 in D Minor), and one of only three concertos where the first movement is in 3/4 time (the others are 11 and 14). The concerto has long been considered one of Mozart's greatest works. Arthur Hutchings described it as the most "concerted" or integrated of all the concertos

Interesting Links about the 2 Concertos:
Click Here (Analysis on YouTube of timing of first movement of 23)
Click Here (Analysis of 23)
Click Here (Timing of themes and Movement Structure of 23)
Click Here (Download PDF file analysis of first movement of 23)
Click Here (Analysis of 24)
Click Here (Analysis of 24)
Click Here (Analysis of 24)