Piano Concerto No. 23 in A, K. 488
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

[1786]

Mozart delighted his fans in Vienna by introducing a dozen new piano concertos between 1784 and 1786, with many of them heard first at his highly anticipated subscription concerts. He entered the Piano Concerto No. 23 in A into his catalog of completed compositions on March 2, 1786, and he probably debuted it on one of the three programs he presented that spring.

Preliminary sketches, which may date from as early as 1784, included a pair of oboes in the instrumentation, but the final version substituted clarinets instead. (Mozart’s deepening friendship with a clarinetist and fellow freemason had much to do with the surge of clarinet music he wrote in his final years.) The concerto’s first movement gives the woodwinds far more attention than they would have been accustomed to at that time, starting with unaccompanied phrases in the orchestra’s introductory tutti and continuing in the conversational development section.

Later editions notched the tempo of the middle movement up to Andante, but Mozart’s manuscript for this heavy-hearted movement clearly calls for the slower and more affecting Adagio tempo. Again the woodwinds play an outsized role in accompanying and answering the piano, and they also introduce the only wholly cheerful passage in the movement, in the contrasting major key. Minor-key episodes within the rondo finale rehash some of the angst of the slow movement, but the main recurring theme always reaffirms the jovial home key with its definitive leaps.

Solo piano; flute, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, strings