Carnegie Hall: Mitsuko Uchida Performs Mozart Piano Concerti

On Friday evening I went to Carnegie Hall to hear a concert given by the Mahler Chamber Orchestra that featured the great Japanese pianist Mitsuko Uchida conducting as well as performing as soloist on two late Mozart concerti that, although written only a year apart, were of highly different character.

The program opened with Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 19 in F major, K. 459 (1784).  In contrast to the D minor concerto played later in the concert, the K. 459 is a fairly lighthearted work and perhaps for that reason is not played so often as the composer's other concerti.  Mozart himself thought highly enough of it to perform it at the coronation of the Holy Roman Emporer Leopold II in 1790.  Despite its cheerful nature the concerto is nevertheless a highly complex work, not least in the extensive use of counterpoint in the final movement.  One interesting point is that Mozart, when entering the concerto in his catalog, called for the use of trumpets and tympani which was highly unusual for works he composed in the key of F major.  As it is, no written parts have ever been found for these instruments.

The next piece was Berg's  Lyric Suite (1926).  Although the abstract theoretical nature of the twelve-tone system might lead one to believe that its adherents were a group of dry academics, nothing could be further from the truth.  The private lives of these composers sometimes resembled a soap opera in their romantic entanglements.  In this case, though Berg nominally dedicated his Suite to Alexander von Zemlinsky from whose Lyric Symphony he had taken the title of his own piece, the work actually had a secret program and dedication to the married Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, sister of Franz Werfel, at whose home in Prague Berg had been a guest.  In the annotated score which Berg presented to Hanna, he wrote:

"It has also, my Hanna, allowed me other freedoms! For example, that of secretly inserting our initials, HF and AB, into the music, and relating every movement and every section of every movement to our numbers, 10 and 23. I have written these, and much that has other meanings, into the score for you. ... May it be a small monument to a great love."

It was in 1928 that Berg arranged for string orchestra the second, third and fourth movements of the six-movement quartet.  As one might gather simply from the names of the movements (Andante amoroso; Allegro misterioso – Trio estatico; and Adagio appassionato), the music is highly dramatic.  By abridging the content of the original quartet Berg heightened this drama even further.  At this concert, the piece did not really have any connection to the Mozart music that came before and after it and I suspect was included principally to provide "padding," but it was nonetheless given an excellent performance and was highly enjoyable to hear.

After intermission, the program closed with a performance of the Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466 (1785).  At the time Mozart composed the K. 466 he was at the height of his popularity in Vienna.  The concerto is actually the first of a several written for a highly remunerative series of subscription concerts.  In 1785, he would write two more, the K. 467 in C major (actually composed the same month as the K. 466) and the K. 482 in E-flat major, while in the following year he would pen the K. 488 in A major, the K. 491 in C minor, and the K. 503 in C major.  Taken together, all of them masterpieces of the genre, these constitute one of Mozart's greatest achievements as a composer.  Of them all, however, the K. 466 was the only one whose popularity was to endure into the nineteenth century's Romantic era.  It's easy to see why this would be the case.  Despite Mozart's new found prosperity, it's a stormy work whose dark musings could not fail to appeal to the Romantic temperament.  This is especially true of the finale, a tempestuous episode that moves from the home key of D minor to G minor before at last finding resolution in the key of D major, a change so abrupt it reminds one of the sun suddenly appearing as the storm clouds that have obscured it finally break.

The first half of Friday evening's concert was highly enjoyable, but it was in the second half that the performance rose to a new level. Mitsuko Uchida is one of the finest interpreters of Mozart's piano music now active, and both she and the orchestra were superb in their rendition of the D minor concerto. The work's continuing popularity - Beethoven routinely included it in his own concerts - is no accident, but it is only in the hands of the most gifted musicians such as Ms. Uchida that its genius can be fully appreciated.

I was fortunate to have attended this concert in person, but it was also broadcast live on WQXR.  The archived performance is currently available for listening on the station's website.