Customer Reviews

A Companion to Mozart's Piano Concertos (Clarendon Paperbacks)

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This, the most famous study of the Mozart piano concertos, is one of those books it is possible to read over and over again without any loss of the initial delight.
I first read this book because I became confused about how concertos are meant to"work". They did not seem at all like symphonies, with the usual exposition, development and recapitulation, and it was very hard to see what really was going on. Hutchings, building on the earlier and equally famous work by esp. Tovey and Girdlestone, traces the development of the unique Mozartian conception from its naive beginnings to the supreme examples we think we are familiar with.
Several points emerge from this. The first, overwhelming impression is that Mozart's ability is, if anything, greatly underrated. We admire Mozart for his pretty tunes perhaps; but Hutchings shows that his real genius lies in his structural understanding of music. As structural masterpieces, his mature piano concertos have never been rivalled; not by Beethoven, nor by Brahms, nor by the twentieth century protests against romanticism. Perhaps you may think that analysis of music destroys its worth; but Hutchings demonstrates the opposite. Understanding the vast effort that must have gone into these works greatly increases one's sympathy with the composer and his works. And it gives rise to a little sadness: perhaps Mozart was a dead end, who in some ways never gave rise to any further developments (unlike, say, a Haydn-Beethoven-Romanticism route). In the piano concertos, the greatest aspects of his (largely) operatic are on full display; and, as Hutchings says, these include unique features such as his way of writing for the winds, that died when he died.
Hutchings is not afraid to indicate poor movements when they occur; and this brings up the point that writing supreme music is unbelievably hard; a task that even Mozart was not always up to. Still you do not have agree with him! And one of the greatest pleasures I can imagine is to sit with Hutchings in one hand, listening to one of the piano concertos and smiling with recognition as the patterns revealed by your eyes and your ears are found to be one.
I wrote this review listening to the last movement of K449, the piano concerto no 14, one of the greatest of all the things Mozart wrote; yet still hardly known - unless you have read Hutchings!

This is a perfect read for anyone who is a lover of Mozart's music. It is well-written and researched. Makes a great gift.