Mozart and Britten by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, by Andrew Miller
City Recital Hall, Angel Place
3 February 2011
to be broadcast on ABC Classic FM 92.9 sometime after February
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Concerto in D for piano and violin, K. 315f
reconstructed by Philip Wilby from fragment K. Anhang 56 and violin sonata in D K. 306
Andrea Lam, piano
Dene Olding, violin-director
Benjamin Britten
Sinfonietta, Op. 1
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Symphony in D (from the serenade in D ("Posthorn") K. 320)
Frank Bridge
3 Idylls
No. 2 Allegretto poco lento
I have heard it lamented "O, if only Mozart had written 25 violin concertos in the 1780s and only 5 piano concertos." Notwithstanding the alternate universe where Mozart lived to 89 and wrote many of each, the D major concerto for piano and violin, as Philip Wilby reconstructed it in 1985, goes some way to consoling the lamenting violinist. Mozart began composing the fragment (which W. J. Turner in his 20th century biography, disappointed not to have more of it, called a "remarkably fine work") sometime during his month-long stay in Mannheim in 1778 on the way back to Salzburg from Paris. Whereas Mozart wrote the 5 violin concertos for himself to play, this concerto he intended for another violinist, Ignatz Franzl, probably intending to perform the piano part himself; he wrote to his father just before leaving Paris that he wanted to give up playing the violin. This was at a weighty juncture, or at least a phase change, in Mozart's life often implicitly or explicitly considered the fulcrum between "early Mozart" and "late Mozart." Indeed the double concerto shows some of the Mozartish profundity and ecstasy of the later piano concertos while still having much of the humor, play and levity of the young Mozart. Mr Wilby completed the concerto using music from a later violin sonata (in D, KV 306, a lovely recording of which with Corey Cerovsek and Jeremy Denk from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum can be heard on the Petrucci Music Library) into which it seems Mozart recycled his ideas for the double concerto. The sonata does have, at least in retrospect, an unusual singing and independent-minded piano accompaniment, a cadenza, part of which the piano gets to play, and a general feeling of greatness and expansiveness which is an odd attitude for a sonata to be wearing. Thus the reconstructed concerto gives a fascinating foreshadowing of the advancements Mozart gave his art, and his beloved genre the piano concerto in particular. but far from merely a thing of academic interest, the piece is beautiful and touching on a human level and well worth performing.
