Mozart / Piano Concerto No. 18 in B-flat major, K. 456 (Anda)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Piano Concerto No. 18 in B-flat major, K. 456 (1784)

00:00 - Allegro vivace (Cadenza: Mozart/Anda)
12:13 - Andante un poco sostenuto
22:26 - Allegro vivace (Cadenza: Mozart)

Performed by Géza Anda (Pianist & Conductor) and the Camerata Academica des Salzburgers Mozarteums (1965).

"The year 1784 brought forth two more concertos still, very different from the preceding ones [of that year] and from each other. The first, again in B-flat (K. 456), which Mozart completed after recovering from a very heavy cold caught at the première of Il Re Teodoro by Casti and Paisiello, is distinguished by the fact that he wrote it neither for himself nor for a pupil as talented and close to him as Babette Ployer (for himself or for Babette he would certainly not have chosen B-flat again) but for another Vienna virtuoso, Maria Theresa Paradis. This young lady, who had been blind since childhood, and was at that time twenty-five years old, was the daughter of a State Councilor of Lower Austria, and a godchild of the Empress. She was a pupil of Leopold Kozeluch, and she could play, according to Gerber, 'more than sixty clavier concertos [by Kozeluch] with the greatest accuracy and the finest expression, in every way worthy of her teacher.' It is evidence of Mozart's broad‐ mindedness, or of his indifference, that he wrote a new concerto for the pupil of his deadly enemy to perform in Paris, whither a concert tour brought her in the autumn of 1784. For Paris, obviously, Kozeluch's concertos did not suffice. Kozeluch was, again quoting Gerber: 'Without doubt, among young and old, the most generally popular of all composers now living, and that quite rightly. His works are characterized by cheerfulness and grace, the noblest melody combined with the purest harmony and the most pleasing arrangement in respect to rhythm and modulation.'

Now Mozart gave even the Parisians, whom he so hated, credit for desiring something more than that. So he harked back a little to Schobert, Johann Christian Bach, and Schröter. The relations of the solo part and the orchestra in this work are, to be sure, purely Mozartean, characteristic only of him, and perhaps even closer than ever before; but the solo part has a different, more 'feminine,' more sensuous character than the preceding concertos, and that iridescence of expression characteristic of the second Ployer Concerto [K. 453] is almost completely absent. In the Ployer Concerto there is nothing like the modulation to B minor in this Parisian one, emphasized as it is by the combination of 6/8 and 2/4 meters. But Schröter, too, had indulged in such pseudo‐ drama, and the Parisians were fond of that sort of thing. The slow movement consists of variations with coda, in G minor. Their tearful character already has something to do with the loss of Barbarina's pin in Figaro; it is very French. The work is full of miracles of sonority, but it contains none of the 'surprises,' great or small, of the great concertos." - Alfred Einstein

Painting: Staircase in the Palace of Caprarola, Hubert Robert