He knew it without a blue check or follower analytics. The former child prodigy, composing as a kindergartner, knew who he was. It was the later 1780s, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was awash in fame — at the peak of his short life with death around the corner in 1791, just shy of turning 36. Hear Mozart’s fascination with the “old music” of J.S. Bach in the severe and spooky opening of 1788’s Adagio and Fugue that releases into the building fury of repeated, interwoven themes. Be captivated by this prolific period in the composer’s career on April 25 at 7:30 p.m. with Les Violons du Roy conducted by Jonathan Cohen and with guest soloist Inon Barnatan, piano.
Then, if the name “Bach” was mentioned during “peak Mozart,” the first composer to come to mind was probably Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the second son of J.S. Bach. Mozart referenced C.P.E. when he said to his Vienna patron, Gottfried van Swieten: “Bach is the father. We are the children!” How fitting the program segues to Piano Concerto in D minor, H. 420 (Wq.17) by “the father.” It is one of three keyboard concertos that Bach wrote in 1745 in a little over three months. Bach explicitly entered the date 5 April 1745 in the autograph score of Wq. 17. None of the three works (Wq. 15–17) were published. Except for Wq. 17, the others are not widely known, although Bach continued to revise and embellish them.
Felix Mendelssohn, the program’s next prodigy, enters with two works he called sinfonias for strings because of the style, not the number of players, he intended for performance. Rather than the string section of a modern symphony or chamber orchestra, in 1821, the 12-year-old apprentice likely planned these early sinfonias, String Symphony No. 6 in E-flat major and String Symphony No. 2 in D major for five players. These precocious works were for enjoying in the home and at musical soirees, just like the Sunday afternoons Mendelssohn presided over as a privately-tutored tween leading ensembles of the finest professional musicians available in his family’s Berlin home. Early genius abounds in these two of the 13 symphonies he completed by 1823. Enjoy looking for stylistic influences in the young composer during Les Violons du Roy’s program. Count J.S. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, and a strong influence of Mozart.
The final boy wonder, Dmitri Shostakovich, takes position with the bombastic closer Piano Concerto No. 1 in C minor, Op. 35. Shostakovich showed remarkable musical talent early on, gaining admittance to the Petrograd Conservatory at 13 and, at 19, completing his Symphony No. 1, which the Leningrad Philharmonic premiered to great acclaim in May 1926. Afterward, he maintained his elevated status for much of his 20s, even if his modernist approach meant following works didn’t always meet his debut’s success. By 1933’s Op. 35, Shostakovich was focused on composition, not public performance, and was fast approaching a career-defining brink. And the person pushing him to that edge was Joseph Stalin. The Piano Concerto No. 1 belongs to his pre-Stalin period, when Shostakovich produced music of infinite energy, when his world was boundless, and his creativity was unfettered. “When listeners laugh at a concert of my symphonic music, I am not at all upset. In fact, it pleases me,” he wrote in a Soviet magazine in 1934.
