Mozart 1786

After several successful years as a freelancer in Vienna it appears as if Mozart was no longer interested in pleasing Viennese society’s taste with music for pure entertainment. The composer continued down the path of personal discovery he had embarked upon the year before, and with ever more resolve: while Vienna was still “Piano Land” to Mozart, it was now on his terms. His head was primarily full of opera. Mozart’s work on Figaro led him to paint situation and emotion with new colouristic tools which would spill over into the piano concertos that followed it, each of them imbued with a more fluid sense of dialogue between soloist and orchestra. The first concerto on this recording exchanges material with Figaro’s rapid, conversational and changeable style. He expands the orchestration and “there are manic changes in the music.

Volume 7 of Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s Mozart piano concertos survey with Gábor Takács-Nagy and the Manchester Camerata features two of the late concertos – Nos 24 and 25 – along with a spirited reading of the Overture to Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro). Concerto No. 24 was written whilst Mozart was busily composing Le nozze di Figaro, between October 1785 and the première, in Vienna, in May 1786. One of only two piano concertos in a minor key, this extraordinary work possesses many unusual features, including the deliberately ambivalent tonality of the opening melody, which uses all twelve tones of the scale (a pre-echo of serialism??!).

Anima Eterna Brugge, founded by Jos Van Immerseel in 1987, is a period-instrument orchestra based in Bruges. The size of the ensemble varies from seven to eighty musicians, depending on the programme. Its repertory ranges from Monteverdi to Gershwin.

…[Böhm] may be an octogenarian, but he directs the opera for the most part with a spirit and an urgency that many a young man might envy. Most of the accompanied recitatives are alert and fiery, and in this particular work they carry a great deal of the emotional weight. Here and there I find myself at odds with a choice of tempo. Especially in the closing scenes, some of the orchestral recitative seems to need to go more slowly; it is inclined to lack the proper sense of momentousness. I was a little surprised too at the quickish tempo for the opening aria and, most of all, for the great quartet in Act III, which has more turbulence and urgency than usual, particularly with its sharply contoured dynamics and its incisive accents.

Between Die Entführung aus dem Serail and the advent of the famous ‘Da Ponte trilogy’, Mozart threw himself frantically into the search for the right libretto, capable of taking the spectator to lands still unexplored where the drama and the psychology of the characters would be sublimated by the music. Hence, in the years between 1782 and 1786, he set up a veritable laboratory for dramatic music: a musical corpus of concert arias, sketches, and stylistic exercises like the canon – here brilliantly organised as an imaginary dramma giocoso in three scenes, each heralding in its own way one of the summits to come: Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così.

Not among his best known music, Wolfgang Mozart’s Trios for violin, cello and piano have a lighter feel than his more serious chamber pieces, say the K. 515 String Quintet or the “Dissonant” Quartet. They are more charming than profound, so I’ve always paid them much less attention than his quintets, quartets and violin sonatas, something which I also think true of many listeners. This superb release from Augustin Dumay (violin), Maria Pires (piano) and Jian Wang (cello) helps show their relative obscurity is partly caused by disappointing performances, because I very much enjoyed the three the ensemble include in this disc.

Composed in 1786, the Piano Concertos Nos 24 in C minor and 25 in C major are regarded as two of Mozart's finest achievements in the genre. Both are large-scale works, with durations of more than 25 minutes each – the C major concerto is in fact one of the most expansive of all classical piano concertos, rivalling Beethoven’s fifth concerto. Their grandeur immediately made them popular fare in the concert hall – Mendelssohn, for instance, had No.24 in his repertoire through the 1820s and 1830s – and new recordings appear regularly. It is nevertheless relatively rare to hear them performed on original instruments and with orchestral forces corresponding to what Mozart himself would have been familiar with.

The overwhelming success of the Prague performance of Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) in December 1786, led to the commissioning of a new opera. Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte turned to the Don Juan theme, making this promising material the basis for their new opera. In the spring of 1787 Mozart began to compose it in Vienna, and was able to complete it in Prague by the autumn of the same year. Don Giovanni received its first performance, under the composer’s personal direction, on 20 October 1787 at Prague’s Count Nostitz National Theatre. This production of Don Giovanni at the Zurich Opera House was staged by the highly creative team of conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, director Jürgen Flimm and set-designer Erich Wonder. Rodney Gilfry and Cecilia Bartoli lead a first-class group of singers.