The Classical Music Minute

Mozart's Piano Music: Complexity Masked In Simplicity

January 23, 2023 Steven Hobé, Composer & Host Season 1 Episode 99
The Classical Music Minute
Mozart's Piano Music: Complexity Masked In Simplicity
Show Notes Transcript

Description
At first glance, Mozart’s piano music may look simple. Yet for many pianists, the music’s greatest challenge lies in that seeming simplicity.  Take a minute to get the scoop!

Take a listen: Mozart Piano Sonata No 16 C major K 545 Barenboim c/o YouTube

Fun Fact
Another challenge for the pianist is Mozart’s complete mastery of orchestration. Many of the piano sonatas have a symphonic sweep and soundworld in their opening and closing movements, while the slow movements are soprano arias with dramatic interludes. Such piano writing demands that the pianist harnesses his/her imagination to evoke these instruments and sounds within the scope of two staves and just two hands.

About Steven, Host
Steven is a Canadian composer & actor living in Toronto. Through his music, he creates a range of works, with an emphasis on the short-form genre—his muse being to offer the listener both the darker and more satiric shades of human existence. If you're interested, please check out his music website for more. Member of the Canadian League Of Composers.
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At the first glance, Mozart’s piano music may look simple. Yet for many pianists, the music’s greatest challenge lies in that seeming simplicity. 
 
As pianist Alfred Brendel says of Mozart, “everything in his music counts”. Mozart  reduces music to its most essential and demands from the pianist a certain precision. 
 
When you look at a score, it may contain fewer notes than say Liszt or Ravel, but each and every note has purpose and meaning and must be sounded as such.
 
In the piano music of Schumann or Liszt, Brahms or Rachmaninoff there are what you might term thickets of notes which give the pianist a little camouflage if you will. But with Mozart there is nowhere to hide.
 
If you are a fan of Mozart, you can keep coming back to listening to Mozart again and again and always find something new. Brendel  again remarks, “Mozart’s piano works should be for the player a receptacle full of latent musical possibilities which often go far beyond the purely pianistic.”