Piano Concerto No. 15 (Mozart)

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The Piano Concerto No. 15 in B-flat major, KV. 450 is a concertante work for piano and orchestra by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart composed the concerto for performance at a series of concerts at the Vienna venues of the Trattnerhof and the Burgtheater in the first quarter of 1784, where he was himself the soloist in March 1784.[1][2]

In a letter to his father, Mozart compared this concerto with the 16th concerto in D:

"I consider them both to be concertos which make one sweat; but the B flat one beats the one in D for difficulty."[3]

Many pianists consider this to be one of the more difficult of Mozart's piano concertos.[4] The concerto is primarily difficult from its many quick scale patterns which must be played perfectly and also from its many fast chord patterns moving up and down. Beginning with this concerto, Mozart began to use the term "grand" to describe his concerti such as K.450 which feature a prominent and required wind section for the ensemble.[5]

The work is orchestrated for solo piano, flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, and strings. The concerto is in three movements:

  1. Allegro
  2. Andante in E-flat major
  3. Allegro

The first movement is in typical sonata-allegro form[6] and the finale is (as usual for Mozart) a sonata-rondo, although using a less-common ABACABA form.[7]

Simon Keefe has noted contemporary comments from Mozart's era on how the woodwind writing in this concerto showed a "newly intricate and sophisticated" character compared to Mozart's prior keyboard concerti.[1] Elaine Sisman has postulated that Mozart modeled the slow movement on a theme-and-variations movement from the Symphony No. 75 of Joseph Haydn.[8]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Hutchings (p. 290)
  4. ↑ Steinberg
  5. ↑ Keefe, Simon P., The Cambridge Companion to Mozart. Cambridge University Press (2003, ISBN 0-521-80734-4), p. 88.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

Sources

  • Hutchings, Arthur, A Companion to Mozart's Piano Concertos, Oxford University Press (original publication, 1948).
  • Steinberg, Michael, The Concerto: A Listener's Guide, Oxford (1998, ISBN 0-19-510330-0)
  • Keefe, Simon, Dramatic Dialogue in Mozart's Viennese Piano Concertos: A Study of Competition and Cooperation in Three First Movements, The Musical Quarterly, vol 83, number 2, pp. 169–204, Summer 1999 [1]

External links

  1. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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