All Mozart

This week on Arizona Encore, we bring you an All-Mozart Concert.  Included are two works from the composer’s “Vienna Years,” which covered 1781 to 1891, when Mozart died a couple of months before his 36^th birthday.  These include one of his six Hadyn Quartets and a clarinet concerto.  The third is a piano sonata Mozart composed when he was just 19 years old.

Mozart dedicated the six string quartets in his Opus 10 to Franz Joseph Hadyn, leading them to be called the “Hadyn Quartets.”  Such a dedication was unusual during Mozart’s time, when composers usually dedicated their works to members of the royal or noble class. Hadyn’s Opus 33, also a set of six string quartets, called the Russian Quartets, were  dedicated to the Russian Grand Duke. The Russian Quartets are recognized as having been the inspiration for Mozart’s own set of six.  With them, Mozart followed — and some say surpassed — Hadyn’s example of composing four highly developed parts. This was in contrast to earlier string quartets where one part was more dominant. After Mozart previewed the set for Hadyn, the elder musician told Leopold Mozart that his son Wolfgang was “the greatest musician known to me either in person or by reputation.”

Opening this Arizona Encore is Mozart’s String Quartet No. 19 in C. Major, K. 465, the last of the six Hadyn Quartets.  It is called the “Dissonance Quartet” because of the unusual “clashing pitches” in the first movement. The quartet was not especially well received initially, although today many consider it one of the finest of Mozart’s 23 string quartets. The Arod String Quartet from France opens this Arizona Encore program with their April 2022 performance of the Dissonance Quartet at Tempe Center for the Arts as part of Hayden’s Ferry Chamber Music Series.

The clarinet was relatively new during Mozart’s time and had only been a standard member of orchestras for about a decade.  Mozart’s appreciation for the clarinet is obvious in his clarinet concertos, especially the two he composed for clarinetist Anton Stadler. The second of these, the Clarinet Concerto in A-major, K. 622,  was his final instrumental composition.  One music historian called it “astonishingly beautiful.” Opening the second half of this Arizona Encore, clarinetist Andy Kim and pianist Gail Novak perform its  third movement, the Rondo, from their December 2020 concert at the Musical Instrument Museum during Arizona Musicfest.

Lastly, we bring you a piano sonata Mozart composed at the age of 19. A piano prodigy himself, Mozart began earning money playing piano and violin for royals and nobles when he was six years old.  He was highly influenced by the keyboard works and technique of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the most famous of Johann Sebastian Bach’s four musician sons. C.P.E. Bach composed over 1000 compositions and is known to have influenced  Hadyn and Beethoven as well as Mozart.

Pianist Ling Yi concludes this Arizona Encore with Mozart’s Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, K. 281 from her November 2022 performance at the Tempe Center for the Arts as part of Hayden’s Ferry Chamber Music Series. Li came to the United States at the age of 14 from her home country of China to study at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music. She has since completed a master’s at the Julliard School and performed with several leading national and international orchestras.