By KLARA MIN

The Russian Romantic poet Alexander Pushkin articulates the force of Mozart's genius in his verse drama Mozart and Salieri, written in 1830:

Mozart: (having played a newly composed piece) Well, do you like it?
Salieri: What profundity, what boldness, and what art of composition! You, Mozart, are a god and know it not! I know it.
Mozart: Bah, really? Perhaps I am.

Ki-Sun Sung

No doubt, one can never adequately explain Mozart's artistic impulses, nor trace the cradle of his divine inspiration. His music is a surprise of the expected, yet displays almost to an inhuman degree the perfect balance between force and transparency, logic and irony, aloofness and intimacy, passion and tranquility, structure and freedom. Mozart's compositional method puts him in a category by himself. Beethoven can be thought of as rather architectonic and procedural, in that he was constantly weighing and revising his musical ideas until he came up with a final version. Mozart, by comparison, had no trouble organizing his musical ideas: they append to one another just as easily and logically as elements in a kaleidoscope. He would first formulate the entire work in his head, quickly sketch the outline on music paper, and then fill in the missing details. In a letter to his father, he wrote: "… and everything has been composed, but not yet written down." Filling in those blank sheets of paper was for him an extremely strenuous and time-consuming task. In spite of his natural genius, one cannot assume he did not have the artistic integrity to attend to the specifics of his compositional craft.

His piano concertos are clearly the most progressive genre in Mozart's body of work, providing him with much ground for experimentation and exploration, and comparable in importance to Beethoven’s nine symphonies. Over the period from his fifth concerto, K. 175 (his first original concerto, rather than an arrangement, written in 1773) to the last concerto, K. 595 (written in 1791), his invention in this genre sparkles in multiple dimensions.

What is it, then, that makes Mozart's piano concertos so special? In his time, polyphony was gradually going out of fashion, with the side effect that composers treated orchestral ritornellos merely as background accompaniment. But Mozart, without going back to strict polyphonic traditions, cultivated the idea of a "competition" between soloist and orchestra, introducing innovations of orchestration, form, and texture. He utilized the full opera orchestra, rather than the traditional string ensemble with limited winds. He gave his wind instruments virtuosic roles, elevating them to solo status, thereby broadening and enriching their expressive scope. The increasing complexity of his musical structure and orchestration parallels the composer’s artistic growth. Six of his concertos are written in Salzburg—K. 175, K. 238, K. 242, K. 246, K. 271, and K. 365—and the rest in Vienna. His effort to win artistic freedom and emancipation from Salzburg profoundly affected the composer's intellectual outlook, as reflected in those Viennese concertos. He apparently spent much more time and care on the process of composition. Each concerto has its own unmistakable identity, from the highly individualized and colored profile of its very first notes. Busoni states, "Unmistakably, Mozart takes singing as his starting-point, and from this issues the uninterrupted melodiousness which shimmers through his compositions like the lovely forms of a woman through the folds of a thin dress." Mozart took simple, straightforward melodic ideas as building blocks and made them into extremely sophisticated compositional structures.

Mozart's piano concertos are the most progressive genre in his body of work, providing him with much ground for experimentation and exploration.

A series of eight concerts featuring the jewels that are the Mozart piano concertos will be presented by Yamaha Artists Services in association with the New York Sinfonietta, a New York-based chamber orchestra directed by Juilliard alumnus and Pre-College faculty member Ki-Sun Sung (M.M. '94, viola), in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth (January 27, 1756). The concerts will take place once a week during February and March and showcase all 23 original concertos (along with two alternate rondos), with each concert including three piano concertos. A total of 26 pianists from Germany, Poland, Spain, Scotland, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Russia, and the United States will be featured as the soloists. The February concerts will take place at the Yamaha Artists Salon on Fifth Avenue at 54th Street; the March concerts will be at the Good Shepherd Church, right next door to Juilliard on West 66th Street.

Sung, who has conducted in many different cities and admits there is a certain pressure inherent in "playing in front of the high expectations of New York audiences," is nevertheless excited to be presenting this series in a city whose "powerful energy" matches that of Mozart's concertos. "Sometimes a series looks nice on a program, but is boring in reality because of the homogenous style of music," he says. "This is never the case with Mozart's piano concertos. Each has its own universe, its own story to tell." In the view of Juilliard faculty member Jerome Lowenthal (who will be one of the soloists on the February 14 program), the series "promises two months of pleasure."

Mozart died while still in the springtime of his creativity, after a short life of just 36 years. Needless to say, he left many works in skeletal form, with blank measures and pages. In his piano concertos, for instance, solo parts are almost entirely lacking in dynamic markings, and many portions require the performer to fill in his own variants, embellishments, lead-ins, and cadenzas, excluding some that were provided by the composer himself. It is clearly a challenge for each pianist in this series to display an understanding of Mozart's style and yet retain his or her own pianistic identity. Mozart often improvised cadenzas as a demonstration of his virtuosity; however, some of the cadenzas that he actually wrote down were obvious extensions of the main body of the movements.

Another point for performers to keep in mind is that Mozart was not narrow-minded in his performance practice, but allowed his imagination to soar and go beyond the capability of the instruments. His was a constant exploration for the sound that he wanted to produce. Despite the general lightness of his keyboard instruments, he was eager for more tonal resonance and did not hesitate to experiment with instruments. The poster of a concert featuring him in a first performance of his D-Minor Concerto, K. 466, on March 10, 1785, indicated that he would be using an extra-large pedal piano. He also wrote about his new klavier in a letter dated October 17, 1777: "When I strike hard, I can keep my finger on the note or raise it, but the sound ceases the moment I have produced it. … It is never stronger or weaker or entirely absent, in a word, it is even."

For complete information about the programs and performers in the series, visit the links below: Yamaha's Web site A PDF of the concert flyer

Is Mozart’s music simple? The answer to that question is yes and no. "He did not remain simple and did not grow over-refined," said Busoni. Simplicity has taken on a rather derogatory connotation in our generation, and this is quite contrary to the spirit of Mozart. He believed in the divine, in the supernatural origin of his talents, which he cherished with deep humility, while retaining a posture of nobility. In a letter to his father in 1778, he wrote, "I am a composer and was born to be a Kapellmeister. I neither can nor ought to bury the talent for composition with which God in his goodness has so richly endowed me." The performer’s duty is of course to be faithful to the message of the composer. But additionally it is to overcome the lapses and limitations of the printed page, and to pursue a perfection which lies in the Power beyond that of the composer. And this series takes its departure with that concept in mind.

Pianist Klara Min, who produced the Mozart Piano Concerto series with Yamaha, has been on the piano faculty at Wesleyan University and is currently an assistant to James Tocco at the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music. She recently finished Konzertexamen at Luebeck Musikhochschule in Germany.