Run Time: Approx. 44 minutes

Part of being a child prodigy in 18th-century Europe meant that Mozart spent much of his early life traveling and performing for aristocrats. As he began to add “composer” to his growing resume—alongside violinist and pianist—he started writing concertos for himself, mainly as a vehicle to demonstrate his own virtuosity.

The first movement is the perfect Classical concerto Allegro if there ever was one. It’s elegant and playful, full of vivid character contrasts and glimmering technical passages. True to the conventions of the time, the piano and orchestra alternate back and forth in a polite dialogue, they do not compete for the spotlight. Mozart makes us wait a while for the piano to enter, but when it does, the orchestra immediately cedes the stage and the piano takes over with long passages of little to no accompaniment. Here, Mozart the opera composer comes out—the movement is like a great soprano aria, full of drama and beautifully singing lines.

The film Amadeus contains one of my favorite passages about Mozart’s music. In this scene, rival composer Antonio Salieri begrudgingly fawns over a particularly exquisite passage:

“On the page it looked like nothing, the beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse. Bassoons and basset horns, like a rusty squeezebox. And then suddenly, high above it, an oboe. A single note, hanging there, unwavering. Until a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight…This was a music I’d never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing. It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.”

This quote refers to the third movement from the Gran Partita, but Mozart approached the second movement of this piano concerto quite similarly. It begins with a pulse, and then the violins present such a simple melody—just an arpeggio. Next, they’re joined by the winds, the oboe emerging from the texture with a descending line. Again, so simple, yet breathtaking. Then, the piano enters and plays the whole thing on its own. This ability to create arresting beauty from the simplest material is a particular gift of Mozart’s, one that he gives us in many of his adagios, and a magical example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

The third movement is a spritely jaunt that wraps up the concerto on a high note and shows off the keyboard’s brilliant technical abilities. Its form is a Rondo, which Mozart used frequently for his concerto conclusions. A Rondo features a main melody, usually called the “A theme,” that returns after each episode of new material, similar to the way pop songs return to a main chorus after every verse. This structure is perfect for finales because it allows the composer to intersperse all kinds of virtuosic flash in between segments of a familiar, and usually very hummable, melody. That’s exactly what Mozart does here, and the result is a catchy resolution full of fireworks.