Friday, August 14, 2015

La chambre de Mozart

Our Summer 2015 Friday Blog and Podcasts reach into past musings. Today's post is a repeat of a Tuesday Blog from July 26, 2011.

Some of the post's content and illustrations were changed to fit this month's thematic arc.



Today’s post was designed originally to reuse a Tuesday Blog from four summers ago – the Summer of the String Quartet is what I’d called it – where I proposed a pair of Mozart quartets. However, upon getting re-acquainted with the post, the discussion accompanied my then-original version of Mozart’s European Vacation (which was an encore a few weeks ago in this Mozart series) and used the opportunity to insert a pair of Czech quartets as a salute to Mozart’s last stop in Prague.

So, if you allow me, I will simply recast the post as “Intimate Mozart”, and rather than fish into YouTube, I will make use of the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum music library.

I won’t take time to introduce each piece individually – Mozart wrote substantial chamber works, for many settings and different combinations of instruments. To make things interesting, I retained four chamber works, for different groups of players. Three of the four feature the piano with string players, and the fourth is a string quartet. The first piece on the program is the only piece that I retained from the original playlist – Mozart’s “Hunt” quartet.

The piano is paired with three, two and finally one player – thus a piano quartet, a piano trio and a sonata for violin with piano. The last piece  segues nicely to a Tuesday port from February when I features several violin sonatas.

I think you will love this music too!

Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART (1756-1791)
String Quartet No. 17 in B-flat major, "Hunt", K. 458
Performed by the Borromeo String Quartet

Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor, K. 478
Performed by the Nash Ensemble

Piano Trio No. 3 in B-flat Major, K. 502
Performed by the Claremont Trio

Violin Sonata in B-Flat Major, K. 454
Ani Kavafian, violin
André-Michel Schub, piano

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