PROGRAM NOTES

In letters to his son, Leopold Mozart repeatedly admonished Wolfgang (here in paraphrase): “your music is too complicated. People just want to be entertained.  Keep it simple and they will buy it!  Then please send some money to me as I am down to my last pair of stockings!”

Fortunately for us, Mozart eschewed entertainment’s simple surface. Instead he found means to express an endless range of emotions in his music, from charming ‘highs’ to ‘lows’ of deepest melancholy. 

Mozart’s means of expression is precisely as ‘simple’ and as ‘complicated’ as are emotions.  In Maynard Solomon’s words, “The beauty of Mozart’s music is its refusal to remain quiescent until it has exhausted all its possibilities, or at least until it has shown, by example, that those possibilities are manifold and endless.” 
Tonight’s dramatically rich program progresses from Mozart’s musically warm key of E-Flat of the first work into the darker world of A Minor in the two center works, returning to warmth again in B-Flat to end the program.  
The Sonata in E-Flat, K.282, opens with a slow and warmly lyrical first movement. Elements of Austrian charm color the two lively minuets of the second movement, while the sonata’s exhilarating last movement up-ends the contained and formal beauty of the preceding movements.

Mozart composed his only Sonata in A Minor following the unexpected death of his mother while they were in Paris (an event for which he felt the necessity to “cushion” the news for his father, by writing letters saying she had become ill, when in fact she had already died). The first movement seemingly explodes with shock, breathless anguish and tumultuous emotions.  The second movement’s pianistic ‘oratory’ speaks of sorrow, the difficulty of acceptance, and consuming pain.  The last movement's fleeting and ghostly theme leads to mercurial dynamic juxtapositions of ‘fire and ice.’  From turbulent passages, the music diverges for a moment of sweetest memory before relentlessly driving to its end.

The haunting beauty of Mozart’s Rondo in A Minor—like the preceding Sonata of the same key—comes from a place of loss.   A late-Mozart work, it shows Mozart's style broadening into musical material soon to pass into later composers’ hands.

The opening of Mozart’s ineffably light and brilliant Sonata in B-Flat, K.570, lifts the music upward. Flashes of virtuosity blend with lyrical melodies in Mozart’s late, elegant style.  The second movement begins with horn calls bidding a farewell; between recurrences of this theme, the music explores acceptance, loneliness, and unending affection.  The last movement, also with a recurring rondo theme, is upbeat and happy-go-lucky, with a sense of fun that could only be Mozart!