Mozart - Piano Concerto No. 20 in d minor

Driving to work, I picked up a CD with this concerto on it and had it blasting out of my car speakers while driving down the long road that winds through the forest preserve. It seemed like the best music to pair with the late October leaves, the shades of red, orange, yellow, and green. I think it’s interesting how we like to Romanticize Mozart’s music when the Romantics themselves weren’t as big of a fan of his work. Of course they loved and respected Mozart and his life story, and helped create the legendary character of Mozart the Genius Composer who wrote scores down perfectly and all that, but his music was too “old fashioned”, to balanced and for the courts and upper class. They didn’t feel that the music had the same umph and humanistic energy and unbridled passions that they represented in their music. But they couldn’t deny that his two minor key piano concertos, this one and no.24 in c minor, feel like proto-Beethoven. It was also a personal favorite for Mozart to play at concerts. The work has a stormy and agitated introduction, and a dramatic movement that ends with a cadenza [in typical practice the pianist improvises his or her own]. the middle movement is a calm reactive with typical echoing passages. The piano launches into a toccata like finale, that stays in the minor up until the last minute, after another dazzling cadenza, it becomes major. There isn't’ a gradual transition, the major just happens in the coda. Beethoven seems to model the ending of his c minor piano concerto after this one. I chose to share a performance on period instruments because it’s always great to listen to the crisp tone that would have been what audiences in Mozart’s time would have heard.

Movements:

1. Allegro

2. Romanze

3. Allegro assai