Richard Goode Plays Mozart

richard goode plays Mozart

Please note that this concert will not be livestreamed.

This concert features renowned pianist Richard Goode performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto K. 503 with the Festival Orchestra under the baton of Peter Bay.

PAQUITO D’RIVERA
Wapango
Isabelle Jamois, flute • Toyin Spellman-Diaz, oboe • Frank Tao, clarinet • Christian Whitacre, bassoon • Daniel Halstead, horn

ERNST VON DOHNÁNYI
Sextet in C Major, Op. 37
Katia Sofia Waxman, clarinet • Daniel Halstead, horn • YooJin Jang, violin • Liz Freivogel, viola • Denise Djokic, cello • Jon Nakamatsu, piano

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major, K. 503
Richard Goode, piano • Peter Bay, conductor • Festival Orchestra

program notes

PAQUITO D’RIVERA 

Wapango (1990)

Paquito D’Rivera’s Wapango first appeared as the penultimate track on his second solo album, Mariel (1982), which he produced shortly after he defected from Cuba and moved to New York City. Most of the album features D’Rivera playing original tunes on alto saxophone together with a standard jazz combination of piano, percussion, and bass. Wapango forms a striking contrast with the other numbers in the set, opening with an extended, bounding, polyphonic saxophone chorus that establishes the main tune before the full band enters. In his memoir, My Sax Life, he mentions that he originally wrote this part of the piece for the saxophone quartet of his colleague Carlos Averhoff, with whom he worked before leaving Cuba. In the past few decades, Wapango has been arranged, performed, and recorded by many chamber ensembles. On YouTube, there is a split-screen video from the height of the Covid-19 Pandemic of D’Rivera playing it together with himself and a few others, and he has spoken fondly of a particular rendition of it by the Turtle Island String Quartet, who took it and “turtleized it.”

The piece features the clashing combination of 6/8 and 3/4 time typical of the Huapango, a Mexican dance. The rhythmic groove is set up as a hocket, meaning that the line is split between different instruments, as if one is finishing the other’s sentences. This aspect of the piece is well served by this wind quintet transcription, in which the diversity of timbres in the ensemble makes the interactive divisions of the bassline particularly pointy and characterful.

ERNST VON DOHNÁNYI 

Sextet in C Major, Op. 37 (1935)

In 1934, Ernő Dohnányi assumed the directorship of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, Hungary’s main conservatory. It was a leadership role he had long wished to occupy. He had returned to Budapest in 1915 after a period teaching and performing in Berlin, and since that time he had been working together with fellow composers of his generation, like Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, to build up Hungarian educational and performance institutions. He had briefly served as director of the school in 1919, but he was pushed out after a few months because the government favored another candidate, Jenő Hubay. When Dohnányi finally got the job in the 1930s, he only kept it for a few years; in 1941, he resigned rather than capitulate to Nazi demands that he expel all Jewish staff and students. 

His short tenure got off to a slow start because he suffered from a series of health problems, including a terrible case of thrombosis that left him stuck at home for several months. He composed the Sextet for Clarinet, Horn, Violin, Viola, Cello, and Piano during this period of bedrest, and one of the first things he did upon recovering was to play in the premiere of the work, which took place in June 1935. An early reviewer of the piece noted the originality and effectiveness of the mixed ensemble, which feels almost like a small chamber orchestra. The four instrument families of a symphony — winds, brass, strings, and percussion — are all represented.

Dohnányi’s harmonic and melodic style remained largely rooted in the late-nineteenth-century language of Johannes Brahms, but he liked to do some rather curious things with form. In the first movement of his Sextet, he writes out a varied repeat of the exposition rather than calling for a verbatim repetition. In the two versions of the section that he presents, the main themes appear in the same keys in roughly the same places, but the transitions and modulations between them are realized differently. It’s a nod to the structure of solo concertos, but also a decision that gets the listener accustomed to hearing different ways that the movement’s primary musical ideas can be framed. This strategy proves important to the remainder of the piece: first movement themes re-appear at the end of the third movement variation set and also before the closing of the bubbly finale. The flexible familiarity that his idiosyncratic opening movement helps to engender makes these moments of cyclic return all the more hard-hitting.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major, K. 503 (1786)

Between 1784 and 1786, W. A. Mozart wrote and premiered twelve new piano concertos for a string of concerts in Vienna. He was an undeniably agile composer and performer; he dated the manuscript to the last of these, his Concerto in C major, K. 503, on December 4, 1786, and he played in the piece’s first performance the next evening. Still, it’s worth noting that Mozart was certainly not tossing things off or churning them out. In reality, he worked on that concerto periodically over the course of two years and only completed it after carefully puzzling out some compositionally problematic passages in the opening Allegro maestoso.

In May of that year, Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro had its first run in Vienna, soon followed by a well-received production in Prague and a commission for his next opera, Don Giovanni. His writing for the stage and his instrumental works from that time share many features. The pompous dotted rhythms of the opening subject of the C major Piano Concerto lend the music the quality of a grand, theatrical overture. Mozart attaches a set of three, light upbeats to the lyrical and transitional themes throughout the concerto’s first movement, which gives these melodies a playfulness reminiscent of the comic numbers found throughout Figaro. And the wind writing at the beginning of the sweet Andante is so like his opera arias that it is a genuine surprise when a piano, rather than a voice, enters after the introduction.

One of the most satisfying and characteristic aspects of this concerto is the way that Mozart often plays a little snippet of music twice, once in major and once in minor. He uses this mode-mixing replay with single measures, with parts of phrases, and sometimes with whole melodies. This is a fairly basic trick in a composer’s toolbox — Franz Schubert did this all the time to efficiently re-frame a tune in an alternate mood. But Mozart’s use of these repetitions is particularly effective in this piece, creating dramatic dialogues between different sections of the orchestra and also between the soloist and the ensemble.

Program Notes by Nicky Swett