Mozart’s piano concerto KV466 was introduced to the world at one of the composer’s so-called academies, i.e., subscription concerts: “produced by and starring W.A. Mozart,” as we might say today. The success of the Concerto on February 11, 1785 was considerable, based in no small part on the composer’s playing of the demanding solo, the entire presentation made additionally exigent by the fact that the ink was still wet on some of the orchestral parts until an hour before the performance.
While the Concerto makes its stormy intentions clear from the very beginning, it does not state its principal theme at the outset; rather, there are a few bars of murmurous, agitated, syncopated swirlings in the violins and violas, with stabbing cellos and basses, until the tension explodes – for the first of several times in this turbulent music – in a volley for the entire orchestra.
The piano creeps in with a quiet, almost frightened-sounding theme, which the orchestra attempts repeatedly to banish. The battle is unceasing, and there is no victor. The tension remains to the end, unresolved (albeit in D minor).
The only thing predictable about the slow movement is that it will provide graceful, lyric contrast. But it does so with qualms. At midpoint, Mozart intrudes on the calm, B-flat song with a cyclonic presto outburst in G minor, jolting listener and performer from their reverie, with the soloist forced to race up and down the keyboard with a degree of virtuosity elsewhere in Mozart restricted to the outer movements of a concerto.
As in the finale of Mozart’s Concerto in F, K. 459, the piano in th this work announces the theme and then gives way to a rich, long development in the orchestra. In K. 459 it is blithely sublime; here it’s all fire and fangs, before the re-entry of the piano, with some particularly felicitous interchanges with the winds.
But menace remains in the air. There is no transition to the major; it just happens. The conflict was not going anywhere, only becoming more conflicted. Thus, the conclusion of this most D-minor of concertos is in D major.
Here is Ms. Argerich to play this concerto for you:
