Giovanni De Cecco

Bach started to compose the “6 Concerti per il cembalo concertato” Wq 43 at the end of 1770, 2 years after moving to Hamburg and succeeding his godfather Telemann, who died on June 25th 1767, as Kapellmeister at Hamburg’s Johanneum. Their publication by Breitkopf was advertised in the Hamburg press on November 25th 1772. The concertos were designed to be widely accessible and described as “leicht”, easy, a term that lends itself to different interpretations.
The “ease” of these concertos does not just concern the instrumental and technical aspect, nor the form in which they were conceived.

This double CD offers us an extraordinary glimpse into Mozart’s pianism and the evolution of his creative style. Indeed, when discussing Mozart, a risk frequently comes to the fore. Given the very short span of his earthly life, the precocity of his talent and comparative maturity of his early works, one might gather the false impression that Mozart underwent no real stylistic evolution. Whilst Beethoven’s “three periods” are so trite a commonplace of musicology that many advocate a new approach to the periodisation of Beethoven’s style, in Mozart’s case the boundaries are hardly defined, and those unfamiliar with the finesses of his oeuvre might easily consider his output as a unified whole.