In the year 1786, Mozart was making most of his money from performing, rather than composing, and the piano concerti numbers 22-24 were likely premiered on a series of concerts he presented in Vienna during the spring of that year.
It would appear that Mozart intended these pieces solely for his own performance, and they all remained unpublished at the time of his death in 1791. While each of the three has since become a regular fixture in the repertoire, the second of these, No. 23 in A major, stands out as one of the composer’s most intimate and expressive works.
Listen now to Helene Grimaud who shows us the second movement from that concerto:
