Classical Hall of Fame

Instrumental music of the Classical era brings to mind two pairs of contemporaneous composers: Haydn and Mozart, and Beethoven and Schubert. It’s the first pair that takes center stage on this Arizona Encore. Both are represented in keyboard sonatas, a genre that showed remarkable changes over their lifetimes.

Mozart’s journey to Mannheim in 1774 for the production of his opera La finta giardiniera provided opportunities for his own performances as well. He would have played the six sonatas, K.279-284, likely written in the months leading up to the journey. They represent Mozart’s first surviving efforts in extended-form music for his own primary instrument, although he was already 18 by this time.

The sonata in B-flat, K.281 is played by Jan Nikovich, a prizewinner of the 11^th Bösendorfer USASU International Piano Competition at ASU’s Katzin Concert Hall.

Luigi Boccherini had one foot each in the worlds of urbane Vienna where he performed as cellist and the rustic countryside of Spain. Making his home around Madrid for much of his life, he assimilated native Spanish styles and made imitations through the violin family of local instrumentation, the guitar and castanets. As the sibling of multiple professional dancers he had a keen sense of establishing compelling and consistent rhythms. His string quintet G.341 contains a fandango that has inspired performers to add various embellishments of local color, while the minuet from his Op.11/5 quintet has become the paragon of Classical-era elegance, used in countless soundtracks. The Manhattan Chamber players play these two famous movements at Pinnacle Chapel as part of the Grand Canyon Music Festival.

Though not a virtuoso of any instrument Joseph Haydn understood the capabilities of them all. While providing a steady stream of employer-mandated compositions he simultaneously experimented in keyboard sonatas with harmonies and forms far beyond anyone at the time (late 1760s) save C.P.E. Bach. The 31^st sonata (in the Landon catalog) in A-flat is played by Martin James Bartlett in the Hayden’s Ferry Chamber Series at Tempe Center for the Arts.

The same venue hosts the Lysander Piano Trio for Haydn’s late E-flat trio, Hob.XV:29. This was part of the group of three written for Therese Jansen in the mid-1790s during Haydn’s celebrated London era, juxtaposing dreamy nostalgia and trademark humor.