Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K. 503

Program notes

About the Work

Mozart completed his Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major on 4 December 1786, in the same busy stretch that produced the ‘Prague’ Symphony, and probably played it himself in Vienna soon afterwards. It is the last of the great series of concertos he wrote for his own use during his peak Viennese years, and it is the grandest and most public of them all. Where some of the earlier concertos charm or beguile, K. 503 impresses: it is big-boned, ceremonial and symphonically ambitious, the work of a composer at the height of his powers writing on the largest scale the genre allowed.

The key of C major, with its bright trumpets and drums, had long carried associations of pomp and grandeur, and Mozart exploits them fully. Yet the concerto is far from merely festive. Again and again the confident C-major rhetoric is shadowed by sudden turns to the minor, lending the music a searching, ambiguous quality beneath its splendour. Commentators have often heard in its breadth and contrapuntal richness a foreshadowing of the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, which lay two years ahead.

Intriguingly, this magnificent work was not an immediate favourite. Its grandeur and relative reticence (it offers fewer of the obviously seductive tunes of, say, the A-major or C-minor concertos) meant it was less often played, and it only really entered the standard repertoire in the later twentieth century. Today it is recognised as one of the supreme achievements of the Classical concerto: spacious, noble, and inexhaustibly rich.

What to Listen For

The first movement (Allegro maestoso) opens with grand, march-like C-major chords. But listen, just moments in, for the music’s sudden clouding into the minor, a shadow that will keep recrossing the movement and give it its peculiar depth. This is one of Mozart’s longest and most symphonic concerto movements; notice the wealth of themes and the way the piano, when it enters, both joins and gently transforms the orchestra’s grand argument. One of its melodies has often been likened to the ‘Marseillaise.’

The slow movement (Andante) moves to the warm key of F major and unfolds as a serene, songful meditation, the piano in intimate dialogue with the woodwinds, Mozart the opera composer audible in its vocal grace. The finale is a spacious rondo built on an elegant, dancing theme, but it too has surprising reach and contrapuntal interest, far more than a simple romp. Keep your ear on the conversation between piano and orchestra throughout: in this concerto, more than almost any other, they are true equals in a single grand design.