orchestra21

Iowa: Are you ready for the new normal?

Discover it tomorrow when Timo Andres joins us at WCFSO to present his unique version of Mozart’s twenty-sixth piano concerto, in which soloist and composer are rejoined just as they were when Mozart first played the piece in 1789.

[Read more about Andres’ approach and see his performance of the work here]

Mozart performed his twenty-sixth piano concerto twice in 1789-90 and as was his custom [especially in piano works conceived for himself] he improvised extensively, particularly in the left hand. Now composer and pianist Timo Andres inherits Mozart’s mantle, but with a twenty-first century twist. As Timo explains his re-imagining of K537 fills in the many incomplete sections of Mozart’s manuscript with entirely contemporary material:

I approached the piece not from a scholarly or editorial perspective, but more as a sprawling playground for pianistic invention and virtuosity, taking cues from the composer-pianist tradition Mozart helped to crystallize. The left hand gets an extended catalogue of gestures [no more tasteful, 18th-century Alberti bass]. It uses imitation, counter-melodies, and canonic interplay to participate in the musical drama of the right hand [sometimes even leaping above it in register]. Harmonically, new chords both thicken and undermine the existing progressions, adding allusions to music after Mozart’s time [Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Prokofiev, Ives, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and Bartók all make appearances].

At the end of last year Andres and his colleagues from the impressive Metropolis Ensemble performed K537 at Angel Orensanz Center in NYC as an encore to their 2010 premiere of the work; the first movement from that reading is above. Timo arrives in Iowa today to begin rehearsals of the piece with the WCFSO ahead of our collaboration on Saturday night.

[Other movements from the Metropolis performance are here]

Tom Service makes a critical point about aesthetic influence and borrowing in his recent Guardian piece on Mozart’s Requiem.

So allow me to play devil’s – not to mention artists’ – advocate for a radical deconstruction of ‘today’s copyright’: Would we have benefited as a society from lawers getting involved in Mozart’s reuse of Handel’s original content?

Tomorrow night I’m mixing it up and manning the basset horn for a performance of Mozart’s incredible Gran Partita Serenade. I have a beautiful modern horn for this gig but the instrument pictured above is closer in form to the ones Mozart knew through his acquaintance with Anton Stadler. Experience the sound of a period basset in this superb recording by instrument maker and performer Gilles Thome.

[Reproduction of an 18th-century basset horn by Rudolf Tutz]