So what number of violin concertos did Mozart really compose?

Which leaves 5 real, totally authenticated concertos – No. 1 in B flat K207, No. 2 in D K211, No. 3 in G K216, No. 4 in D K218 and No. 5 in A K219, all composed in Salzburg in 1775, though it’s potential that No. 1 might date from a few years earlier.

Remarkably, Mozart was simply 19 years of age on the time, though no much less astonishing is the truth that he was successfully a spare-time violin prodigy. His father Leopold, writer of a extremely influential Treatise on the Basic Rules of Violin Taking part in (1756) and a high-quality orchestral participant, continuously despaired at Mozart’s reluctance to use himself to his violin research.

But it could appear he had the type of pure expertise that made practising nearly an irrelevance. Aged seven, he made his concerto debut with the Salzburg Court docket Orchestra having been just lately appointed second vice-Kapellmeister, and by the point he composed his personal violin concertos he was a seasoned soloist.

Two years later, following a live performance in Munich, for which he did practise, he wrote excitedly to his father ‘I performed as if I used to be the best fiddler in all Europe,’ to which his father replied despondently that if solely he’d play together with his ‘complete coronary heart and thoughts’, he most likely was! Antonio Brunetti, who turned concertmaster of the Salzburg Court docket Orchestra in 1777, despaired that Mozart ‘may play something, if he put his thoughts to it.’ Mozart was additionally an accomplished-enough viola participant to carry out in an advert hoc quartet whose different composer-members had been Haydn, Dittersdorf and Vanhal.

Why did Mozart compose so many violin concertos?

It’s nonetheless unclear as to why Mozart ought to have devoted himself presently with such depth to the violin concerto, a style to which he by no means returned. The most probably clarification is that he had grow to be exasperated performing different composers’ music and needed a few of his personal to play.

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But we all know that Kolb and Brunetti each performed the concertos, as Mozart went to the appreciable bother of writing a brand new central Adagio for No. 5 as a result of Brunetti discovered the unique (which survives as K261) ‘too synthetic’. There may be additionally circumstantial proof that the separate Rondo in B flat K269 might have been composed for the First Concerto as a substitute for the unique at Brunetti’s request.

Indeniable, nonetheless, is the crescendo of inventive creativeness that occurred throughout this era, with every concerto successfully trumping its predecessor, climaxing within the A serious K219, which breaks with conference by first asserting the soloist by way of a quick, sluggish interlude.

Opinions as to how these beautiful items needs to be carried out have modified past all recognition since they had been first recorded. But listening by way of the 40-odd full cycles obtainable, I used to be shocked how rapidly the ear adjusted (for essentially the most half) to every efficiency’s stylistic proclivities, every time soloist, orchestra and conductor/director achieved a musical symbiosis on the highest stage. In the long run it got here all the way down to 4 recordings that captivated so fully I may barely preserve my hand off the repeat button….

The very best recordings of Mozart’s violin concertos

Henryk Szeryng (violin)

New Philharmonia Orchestra/Alexander Gibson

Decca 478 4271 (1966/69)

Henryk Szeryng was one of many nice aristocrats of the violin, for whom purity of interpretative thought was paramount. His excellent qualities – musical eloquence, precision, elegant phrasing, virtuoso ease and a tantalising mixture of technical sophistication and expressive simplicity – had been tailored for Mozart’s lucid soundworlds.

Again and again all through his transcendent Mozart concerto sequence from the Nineteen Sixties, with a loyal New Philharmonia Orchestra beneath Alexander Gibson, Szeryng turns phrases with such naturalness and understanding that it’s as if Mozart had been pondering out loud.

So how precisely does Szeryng obtain his miracles? The brief reply is by a sequence of beautiful, microcosmic inflections, so refined one is barely conscious they’re occurring. These are achieved partially by tiny changes of bow angle, stress and velocity interacting with each other, seamlessly attuned to the violin’s pure resonances.

These are additional intensified by his supreme left-hand precision of vibrato (typically shaded all the way down to nothing) and intonation so incandescently pure as to set the ears ringing. Szeryng seen tempo as a dwelling, respiration organism, and right here he matches adjustments within the character of the music with infinitesimal relaxations and injections of pulse, barely detectable but instinctively felt. Like Mozart’s music itself, his taking part in feels regularly alive and responsive whereas retaining its supreme aristocratic poise.

But for all his consideration to element, it’s his deep fondness for this superb music that’s most urgently conveyed. That is felt notably in Mozart’s unusually diversified finales, which vary from No. 1’s exuberant, quick-fire semiquavers to No. 4’s drone-accompanied rustic episode and No. 5’s outburst of ‘alla turca’ high-jinks, with the cellos and basses instructed to play col legno (with the wooden of the bow). Szeryng’s alternative of cadenzas is (for its interval) additionally impeccable, together with these by Sam Franko, Joseph Joachim and George Enescu.

Broadly obtainable on streaming platforms and as a part of the Philips (now Decca) Mozart Version, Szeryng’s exemplary Mozart sequence – which incorporates the ‘doubtful’ concerto K271a, three shorter items and the Concertone – has additionally been reunited on CD with an excellent account of the K364 Sinfonia concertante with violist Bruno Giuranna in a field set (Decca 483 4194) of Szeryng’s full recordings for Philips, DG and Mercury.