St Petersburg, Concert Hall

Rudolf Buchbinder performs Mozart’s Concerti


PERFORMERS:
The Mariinsky Orchestra
Soloist and Conductor: Rudolf Buchbinder


PROGRAMME:
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Piano Concerto No 23 in A Major, KV 488
Piano Concerto No 24 in C Minor, КV 491
Piano Concerto No 22 in E Flat Major, KV 482


According to the Austrian pianist, his emergence was induced by the spirit of the city in which Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn and Schubert had worked, because “if you live in Vienna you breathe music the same way you breathe the air.” Today, his interpretations of the works of these composers have been recognised as ground-breaking.
Buchbinder studied at the Universität für Musik where his tutors included Bruno Seidlhofer, trained by such maestri as Martha Argerich, Friedrich Gould and Nelson Freire.
Having begun to study music at the age of five, at the age of ten Buchbinder performed Beethoven’s First Concerto, while at the age of fifteen he was an exceptional ensemble-player – together with the Vienna Piano Trio he won 1st prize at the Chamber Ensembles Competition in Munich.
The musician’s numerous fans throughout the world constantly thank him “for making the world and our lives better”. But Buchbinder is by no means an idealist. He does not believe that music can change the world for the better or stop the shed of blood or war. “Where there is music and where there is no music history tells us that people never learn from their mistakes,” he comments in one interview. He abhors pathos. He is sincere both when he talks and when he performs. In considering Mozart “the most dramatic composer” he nevertheless does not fail to comment on his “techniques of creating dramatic collisions” in which he tries to draw in his interviewer. As he explains, “We are too much engaged with the idolisation of classical composers and we see them as perfect geniuses; in his own lifetime Mozart was just such an odd-ball.”
Buchbinder has every right to speak thus, as he undertakes a meticulous study of the character of the composer whose music he intends to perform, and he passes this on to his pupils at the Basel Conservatoire. He has collated thirty-eight complete editions of Beethoven’s sonatas, a tremendous collection of first editions and original recordings. His interpretations are founded on scrupulous research of source materials. The pianist confirms that this explains the inexplicable – his incredible attention to each and every sound and, at the same time, the scale of his musical thought.
Svetlana Nikitina


Mozart’s piano concerto is the apotheosis of the piano, placing the instrument in the broad frame in which it belongs – and at the same time the apotheosis of the concertante element is embedded in the symphonic.
Alfred Einstein

Mozart did not give as much significance to his concerti as later researchers did. Here is an extract from a letter to his father Leopold Mozart dated 28 December 1782: “The concerti are somewhat middling, between too complex and too easy, they contain a great deal of dazzle, they are pleasant to listen to but, of course, they don’t flow into emptiness. In some places connoisseurs alone may receive pleasure – apropos, those who are not connoisseurs should be instinctively pleased with them.”
Mozart composed a huge number of concerti and concertante pieces for strings and woodwinds. These include the Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola. The piano concerti, however, absolutely surpass everything the composer had done in the genre, as only the piano can truly compete with the orchestra. “The keyboard has a power that rivals the orchestra,” wrote Alfred Einstein. And this historian of Mozart continued that “We can see one again that all of Mozart’s keyboard opuses, including the concerti, were written not for the cembalo but for the piano, and that all of the ladies and gentlemen ready to perform the Concerto in C Minor K. 491 or the Concerto in C Major K. 503 on the cembalo had to be driven from the stage.”
Of course, the harpsichord does possess rich timbre possibilities, but it is impossible to attain a blend of the concertante and the symphonic on it which can be attained with the piano. According to Alfred Einstein, it was on the piano that Mozart succeeded in “the most gloomy and the most exultant, the most merry, the most deep, bursting from the sphere of the gallant style into that of the symphony and raise the audience to a higher level.” He also considers that “audiences who have come to understand Mozart’s keyboard concerti are the finest audiences in the world.”
Let us try to justify the compliment given at the start. We listen and we cast a glance around at the panoramic imagery of the concerti that Mozart presents. Here we should note that beyond it lie the composer’s earlier opuses: the ten-year-old (!) Mozart wrote his first piano concerti in 1767, influenced by the music of Johann Christian Bach. “Influenced by” is putting it mildly – the wunderkind simply reworked the three sonatas, Op. 5 of the “Berlin Bach” into the Piano Concerti K. 107. He reworked them and was not at all ashamed of doing so – the genre of the “pasticcio” was widely admired at the time and Johann Sebastian Bach himself had produced transcriptions of concerti by Vivaldi. In Italian in the sheet music it states “Tre Sonate del Sgr. Giovanni Bach ridotte in Concerti dal Sgr. Amadeo Wolfgango Mozart”. “Sgr. Amadeo” did exactly the same thing with works by other less well known contemporaries. For a long time the concerti K. 37, 39, 40 and 41 were considered to be creations of the “true” Mozart until researchers’ efforts discovered their melodic prototypes (because of the modest tutti these concerti are the only ones that can be performed on the cembalo).
In January 1777 Mozart composed his Concerto in E Flat Major K. 271. This was already a master work: a composer at the age of twenty-one, he had won over the public, not by turning to standard imagery but by offering a new concept of the genre. The young genius acquired maturity: the role of the soloist, as never before, was at one with the accompanying ensemble which came to be what is the symphony orchestra.
Alongside the late symphonies, Mozart’s piano concerti represent the zenith of the composer’s creativity, the crowning glory of his instrumental art. In Mozart’s concerti the three-movement structure of form was finally established, the “Italian” arioso-like quality of the slow parts is matched with the robust “German” nature of the sonata allegros and rondo finales. The majority of Mozart’s concerti were composed in Major keys, which does not at all mean that thy are devoid of drama; the inner tension can be felt in the dialogues between the soloist and the orchestra and in the prolonged tutti, in terms of their passion close to the late symphonies.
This drama is restrained, and it is just in two concerti in Minor key (No 20 in D Minor, K. 466, and No 25 in C Minor, K. 491) that we hear hints of the passion that foretold Beethoven and the era of romanticism. It would be no exaggeration to say that these were the first concerto-symphonies in the history of the genre.
Iosif Raiskin

Age category 6+

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