Name: Mozart - Piano Concerto No. 24, K. 491 (1786) {Clara Haskil} | Videos | Gan Jing World
Uploaded: 2022-10-01T00:00:00.000Z
Duration: 29 min 31 s
Description: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791) was one of the most influential, popular and prolific composers of the classical period. A child pro... | Videos | Gan Jing World

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791) was one of the most influential, popular and prolific composers of the classical period. A child prodigy, from an early age he began composing over 600 works, including some of the most famous pieces of symphonic, chamber, operatic, and choral music.

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Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491 (24 March, 1786, Vienna)

I. Allegro (0:00)
II. Larghetto (13:14)
III. Allegretto (20:29)

Clara Haskil, piano and the Orchestre Lamoureux conducted by Igor Markevitch.
November 1960

Description by Brian Robins  [-]
During the early part of 1786 Mozart was busily engaged in the process of completing his opera Le nozze di Figaro, which received its premiere at the National Court Theater in Vienna on May 1. Lack of documentation for the winter and spring months of that year means that we do not know if he repeated the series of Lenten subscription concerts he had mounted the two previous years, but they did witness the completion of two new piano concertos, a genre that from 1784 to 1786 can normally be related to such concert series. One of these, No. 23 in A, K. 488, is a work now known to have been started two years earlier, but the magnificent concerto under consideration was an entirely new work. It was entered into his thematic catalog on March 24, and is believed to have been premiered at Mozart's benefit concert at the Burgtheater on April 7, the last concert he would give there.

The popularity Mozart had enjoyed with the Viennese public as a performer would henceforth start to decline, the C minor Concerto the penultimate of the great series of piano concertos composed for his concerts between 1784 and 1786. One of only two concertos composed by Mozart in a minor key, it is a work that reflects the increasing density and complexity of Mozart's music, the development of a style that already perplexed many of his contemporaries. What, for example, must they have made of the stormy, Beethovenian drama of the opening Allegro, or the chromatic intensity that pervades the concerto?

The autograph score, housed in the British Library, also shows thoroughly uncharacteristic signs of struggle, particularly in the final movement where Mozart attempted several versions of the third variation without ever attaining a resolution. The very full orchestration, the largest forces Mozart ever wrote for in a concerto, is commensurate with the size and power of the work -- flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.

Ludwig van Beethoven admired the concerto and it may have influenced his Piano Concerto No. 3, also in C minor. After hearing the work in a rehearsal, Beethoven reportedly remarked to a colleague that "[w]e shall never be able to do anything like that." Johannes Brahms also admired the concerto, encouraging Clara Schumann to play it, and wrote his own cadenza for the first movement. Brahms referred to the work as a "masterpiece of art and full of inspired ideas."

Among modern and twentieth-century scholars, Cuthbert Girdlestone states that the concerto "is in all respects one of [Mozart's] greatest; we would fain say: the greatest, were it not impossible to choose between four or five of them." Referring to the "dark, tragic and passionate" nature of the concerto, Alfred Einstein states that "it is hard to imagine the expression on the faces of the Viennese public" when Mozart premiered the work. The musicologist Simon P. Keefe, in an exegesis of all of Mozart's piano concertos, writes that the No. 24 is "a climactic and culminating work in Mozart's piano concerto oeuvre, firmly linked to its predecessors, yet decisively transcending them at the same time." The verdict of the Mozart scholar Alexander Hyatt King is that the concerto is "not only the most sublime of the whole series but also one of the greatest pianoforte concertos ever composed". Arthur Hutchings's view is that "whatever value we put upon any single movement from the Mozart concertos, we shall find no work greater as a concerto than this K. 491, for Mozart never wrote a work whose parts were so surely those of 'one stupendous whole'." #ClassicalMusic