Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat major, K. 595

Program notes

About the Work

Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27 is his last, dated 5 January 1791, the final year of his life, and it carries an unmistakable air of valediction. After the grand, public concertos of his peak Viennese years, this one is intimate, serene and autumnal: gentler in scale, more inward, touched with a gentle melancholy beneath its outward calm. He probably gave the premiere himself in March 1791, in what seems to have been his last appearance as soloist at a public concert; by December he was dead. Whether or not Mozart consciously sensed the end, listeners have long heard in K. 595 a quality of leave-taking: music of transparent simplicity and quiet poignancy.

That sense of farewell is sealed by the finale, whose main theme Mozart also used, shortly afterwards, for a little song called ‘Sehnsucht nach dem Frühling’ (‘Longing for Spring’), a setting of words yearning for the return of warmth and flowers and birdsong. In a concerto dated in the depths of a Viennese winter, in the last year of Mozart’s life, the longing for spring is unbearably touching. It is the perfect, intimate opening to a concert that turns, after the interval, to Brahms’s great meditation on death and consolation.

What to Listen For

Listen for the concerto’s gentle, conversational intimacy: Mozart writes for a modest orchestra and treats the piano not as a heroic protagonist but as a first among equals, the music passing tenderly between soloist and ensemble. The first movement is graceful and songful, but listen for the shadows: unexpected chromatic turns and slips into the minor that cloud its serenity with wistfulness.

The slow movement (Larghetto) is one of Mozart’s most sublimely simple, a hymn-like melody of disarming purity, almost childlike in its directness, profoundly moving in its restraint. Then the finale: a lilting 6/8 rondo on the ‘Longing for Spring’ tune, outwardly cheerful and dancing, but with the same vein of gentle melancholy running beneath. Listen for how Imogen Cooper, a celebrated Mozartian, shapes these long, singing lines and brings out the music’s tender, valedictory poetry.