Under the direction of JOHAN HOCK
Relayed from
Queen's College, Birmingham
JOHAN HOCK'S CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
Leader, Norris Stanley
Conductor, JOHAN HOCK
KATHLEEN FRISE SMITH (pianoforte)
This fine, romantic Concerto was written in 1785 when Mozart was at the height of his powers. His father had just come to stay with him and his wife in Vienna, and the very day after his arrival (that is, on February 11) heard his son play this new composition at one of his own subscription concerts. That same night the delighted father wrote to his daughter : ' Wolfgang gave a new and first-rate piano concerto at which the copyist was still working yesterday when we arrived, and your brother had not had time even to play through the rondo, as he had to look over the copyist's work. The (passionately excited) Concerto is in D minor'. Leopold's eyes, he told Marianne, had filled with tears of happiness at Wolfgang's music and his playing of it. The very next evening he had an even greater joy, for Wolfgang invited Haydn to meet his father, and it was on this occasion that the elder master told Leopold : ' I declare to you before God, as a man of honour, that your son is the greatest composer that I know, either personally or by reputation; he has taste, and beyond that the most consummate knowledge of the art of composition '. Incidentally, this visit to Vienna was the last occasion on which Leopold Mozart saw his famous son.
Haydn's so-called' Schoolmaster ' Symphony dates from 1774, two years later than the ' Farewell', ', but eighteen to twenty years earlier than his best-known symphonies, the magnificent ' Salomon ' set. It is a typical work of his Esterhaz period.