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About the Music

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998): Moz-Art à la Haydn
Instrumentation: Scored for two violins and strings
Composed: 1977
Duration: 13 minutes

ProMusica audiences are no strangers to the sounds of Soviet-born Alfred Schnittke or his scores that give the impression of an earlier era. Moz-Art à la Haydn is, however, not among them. There are, to be sure, fragments of Mozart and Haydn you may recognize, though these are fleeting. And the act of darkening the stage, for instance, is a direct nod to Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, though in Haydn’s case, the event was intended as a political statement about his musicians’ need for rest. Ours, however, need none! Less familiar is an actual violin part Mozart left unfinished, ascribed the catalogue number K. 416d, which is played by the orchestra, in semi-darkness, at the start of this work. What follows may be hard to follow, and that was probably Schnittke’s point.

Though born in the Volga-German Republic of the Soviet Union, Schnittke came of age musically in Vienna and its traditions left an indelible stamp on his development. The course of his studies took him through various styles, from Romanticism to Serialism, a progressive and often stringent 20th technique which strenuously avoided any connection to traditional harmony. Said Schnittke, “Having arrived at the final station, I decided to get off the already overcrowded train and proceed on foot.” Consequently, he often composed in a pastiche of styles and in the case of Moz-Art à la Haydn used historical fragments as building blocks for something else entirely. To the mix Schnittke relies on various extended techniques, including playing at the bridge, violent chordal clusters and even whistling, creating an intriguing and sometimes humorous theatrical work that comes off like a dreamworld or hallucination.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): Piano Concerto No. 17 in G Major, K. 453
Instrumentation: Scored for piano, flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, and strings
Composed: 1784
Duration: 30 minutes

The circumstances surrounding Mozart’s G Major Concerto are unclear and historians do not even know for certain if Mozart performed the premiere or if that honor was given to one of his pupils. According to Mozart’s score, the work was completed on April 12,1784 and we know what Mozart’s life was like at the time of the work’s composition. He had been calling Vienna home for six years by this time, having resigned his post in his native Salzburg. As a pianist-composer, Mozart was firing on all cylinders, writing symphonies, church music, opera, and piano concertos for himself to play in public. He had yet to win full-time employment at court, a position he aspired to but would never be granted, but for the time being, he was earning well and had ingratiated himself with Vienna’s music-going public. It was also around this time that Mozart made the formal acquaintance of Joseph Haydn. The two hit it off so well that they soon began to play chamber music together, and Mozart eventually dedicated six string quartets to the elder composer. And in September of 1784, Mozart’s wife of two years, Constanze, gave birth to a second son, Karl Thomas. While their first child had died soon after being born, Karl would live to the ripe old age of 74.

When Mozart began composing piano concertos at age 17, the form of the keyboard concerto was still in a state of flux, so he began tinkering with pre-existing models. By the last of his twenty-one piano concertos, written at the start of what would prove the final year of his life, he had almost single-handedly established the model of how a piano concerto—or any concerto for that matter—should function. Indeed, Beethoven included the master’s concertos in his repertoire some years later.

The joyful Allegro opens with the expected orchestral introduction that establishes the movement’s two main themes: a buoyant first theme, distinguished by its trill and strongly marked rhythms and echoed in the winds before being repeated with greater energy, and the second, a gentler, more impassioned melody. With this material, Mozart will spin out most of what follows, including the brief development at the movement’s center, which explores the fragments of various ideas. Listening to the breadth of Mozart’s ideas and the seamless ease of give and take between the soloist and the orchestra, we can begin to understand just how far above his contemporaries Mozart stood.

Following a four-bar introduction, the Andante gets underway with the winds spooling out vintage Mozartean lyricism. Few composers at the time were using winds for much more than color within an orchestral setting, but Mozart’s exploration of their potential contributed greatly to his miraculous scoring. Listen to how he plays with his listeners’ emotions in this serene landscape by constantly shifting between the major and minor mode.

The operatic character of the spirited Allegretto foreshadows the bird catcher Papageno’s music from The Magic Flute. Curiously, not long after composing this music, Mozart purchased a starling, which became such a favorite pet that upon its death, he honored it with a funeral. Rather than the more typical rondo, this movement unfolds as a series of variations, further demonstrating Mozart’s unparalleled powers of invention. A Presto finale, with its call of the hunt (horns and winds), heralds the concerto’s stirring conclusion.

Michael Daugherty (b. 1954): Diamond in the Rough
Instrumentation: Scored for violin, viola, and percussion
Composed: 2006
Duration: 9 minutes

Composed in celebration of Mozart’s 250th birthday, Diamond in the Rough is vintage Daugherty, with its flair and fizz, its expressive range and finally, its modernistic stamp. The scores by this Grammy-Award winning composer radiate wit, heat and expression, and have been championed by ensembles from the Detroit Symphony and Philadelphia Orchestra to the Kronos Quartet.

Daugherty’s three-movement Diamond in the Rough derives its essence from Mozart; the man and his music. The complex rhythms and gestures of the first movement, “Magic,” reflect the multi-dimensional Mozart, who has come down to us as much in fact as myth. In particular, Daugherty drew inspiration from Papageno’s glockenspiel heard in The Magic Flute. “Fifty-Five Minutes Past Midnight” is a play on the time of Mozart’s death and relies on crystal, water-filled glasses, a curiosity beloved by both Mozart and Benjamin Franklin. “Wig Dance,” says Daughterty, “mirrors the image of Mozart as an avid partygoer who once remarked he preferred ‘the art of dancing rather than music.’”

W. A. Mozart: Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major, K. 364
Instrumentation: Scored for solo violin and solo viola, two oboes, two horns, and strings
Composed: 1779
Duration: 30 minutes

In 1777, a twenty-one-year-old Mozart left the relative security of Salzburg, the city of his birth, in search of employment elsewhere. Traveling with his mother, the pair first visited Mannheim, and then moved on to Paris, but Mozart was unable to secure work anywhere and was soon forced to pawn his valuables. Matters soon turned from bad to worse when his mother suddenly became sick and died shortly thereafter of an undiagnosed illness. Although consumed with other matters, Mozart composed during the trip, including dispatching his Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola.

The sinfonia concertante—literally a combination of symphony and solo concerto—was popular both in Mannheim and Paris, since the orchestras of both boasted virtuoso performers. The precise conditions that gave rise to Mozart’s score remain unknown, as does information about its first performance, but certainly Mozart’s training as both a violinist and violist played into his conception. Indeed, given Mozart’s abilities, we can almost envision him having performed both parts at once, perhaps conducting the orchestra as well!

The beautifully crafted work is a gem, full of lyrical Mozartean themes and featuring a sophisticated balance between the soloists and the orchestra. Following the Allegro maestoso’s orchestral introduction (which sports a Mannheim-inspired orchestral crescendo, by our time hardly a surprising effect but which made a tremendous impression on audiences of the day), Mozart introduces his soloists in unison. The result, subtle yet effective, allows the curtain to rise on both players. It is really with the second theme group, a playful figure that thrice reaches upward, that the virtuoso element truly comes into play. Note the swing of the syncopated orchestral accompaniment that ushers in the development section; this idea was most certainly gleaned from one—or perhaps both—of the orchestras Mozart encountered while traveling.

Mozart scored his 3/4 Andante in C minor, yielding a pathos far removed from what is otherwise a rather lighthearted work, and we are left to wonder if Mozart’s writing reflected his current struggles. The Presto finale returns us to a more playful vein, featuring spirited and often virtuosic exchanges between the soloists, a carefree style far more common to the concerto of Mozart’s day.

Two final thoughts about the Sinfonia Concertante are worth noting. First, the viola part was originally written in D major, a half step lower than the overall key of the work. In practice, the violist would tune the instrument up a half step (known as scordatura), giving it a far more brilliant tone than possible with normal tuning, though most violists today simply perform from a transcribed part. Second, Mozart wrote out the cadenzas at the close of the first two movements himself. While soloists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have been expected to extemporize cadenzas in performance, a work for two soloists created difficulties in this respect. And while talented soloists could certainly have “played off” each other’s ideas, much as jazz musicians do today, Mozart probably didn’t want to take any chances, evidently seeking to avoid compromising the integrity of his composition by filling in the “empty spaces” himself.

© Marc Moskovitz
marcmoskovitz.org