Pennsylvania Chamber Orchestra

PCO Presents Guzman Revisits Mozart

Premiered 3 pm, Sunday, November 8, 2020

Today’s Program

Welcome by Maestro Attar

Interview with Christopher Guzman, piano

Selections from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466

II. Romanze

III. Rondo, Allegro assai

Christopher Guzman, piano

Program Notes

While visiting Vienna in 1875, Leopold Mozart first heard his son’s new concerto in D minor, and he wept for joy. During this visit Leopold was constantly regaled with fresh evidence of Wolfgang’s genius. He reported in a letter to his daughter Nannerl, that Joseph Haydn had visited and had declared, “Before God and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me.”  

Mozart was 29 years old when he composed Piano Concerto No. 20. By the mid-1780s, Mozart had begun to gravitate increasingly toward composing opera, which had long been his dream. His style also began to change as Jeremy Siepmann has commented, much of his music “was increasingly difficult to play, thereby discouraging the amateur; there was a darkening and intensification of its character and a new daring in its harmonies.”

The ink on the score was still wet when Mozart premiered his new concerto at a subscription concert in the Mehlgrube in Vienna on February 11, 1785. Intense, dramatic, and stormy, the three-movement concerto is Mozart’s first in a minor key and the Viennese aristocrats who made up most of his local audience were stunned. They expected to be charmed and enticed, not ravished and ravaged.

It is no surprise that the Romantics became the most fervent advocates for Piano Concerto No. 20, thanks to the young Ludwig van Beethoven, who performed the work in March of 1795 at a benefit concert for Mozart’s widow and surviving children.

Beethoven composed two cadenzas for that occasion, and they are still performed routinely. Mozart’s own cadenzas are lost to time, probably because he hadn’t bothered to write them down. Many worthy pianist-composers have risen to the challenge of providing cadenzas for this concerto including Johannes Brahms, Charles-Valentin Alkan, Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Clara Schumann. From the extensive list of possibilities our soloist, Christopher Guzman, has chosen Ferruccio  Busoni’s cadenza for the third movement.

Program notes by Conductor Laureate, Douglas Meyer.

Video produced by CW Studios.