“I consider it the best piece I have yet completed.”

So wrote Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) in a letter to his father, referring to the Quintet in E-flat Major for piano and winds, written in March 1784 and premiered at Vienna’s Imperial Court Theater. High praise, indeed, from a composer who had already written over 35 superlative symphonies, 15 piano concertos, 16 string quartets, Idomeneo and the great C-minor Mass. Certainly, fresh from the Quintet’s premiere, Mozart might be expected to shower the work with some praise; all artists hope that their most recent work is their best. But Mozart did not describe all of his premieres in this way. What did he find so appealing about this Quintet?

As shown by the “Linz” Symphony, the Horn Concerto K. 447, and the Piano Concertos K. 450, 451, and 453, to name a few, the period from late 1783 to early 1784 was both productive and consistently high in quality. Mozart infused some of the Symphony’s grandeur into the smaller texture of the Wind Quintet, specifically mimicking the Linz’s slow introduction. Once the Allegro begins, he looks to the piano concertos for guidance. Earlier in his career, Mozart himself made chamber arrangements of Piano Concertos Nos. 11-13. With the prominent leading voice of the piano, this Quintet similarly delights as a pared-down concerto. Brilliant passagework in both winds and piano makes the transition sections as engaging as the main themes.

The central Larghetto movement starts in utmost simplicity, but episodic turns to the minor mode create a more expansive structure than is first intimated. In the end Mozart has written a full sonata form, with exposition (and repeats), development, and recapitulation plus coda. The development features dramatic tricks borrowed from Mozart’s symphonic writing, including the slow chromatic descending bassline and mercurial return to tonic. Indeed, the energy from that chromatic development spills over into reprise, which is far from being a pat restatement of the exposition.

Mozart launches the Rondo finale with the main theme as a piano solo. The winds answer, and during the second part of their reply, the piano slips unobtrusively back into the texture. It is an extremely small detail, but it shows the care that Mozart showered on this work. How simple it would have been to entirely separate the two phrases: one for piano, one for winds. Done. Instead, Mozart finds creative ways to overlap their textures. This finale is about as perfect a rondo as he wrote. Witness the deft way the transition back to the first theme takes place, making the rondo’s return feel surprising and yet perfectly timed.

Although Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) was born in a free Estonia, his country endured Soviet occupation from 1940 until 1991. He could easily have been stifled by the narrow-minded artistic dictates that filtered out from Moscow. But early work as an engineer with Estonian Radio brought him into contact with influential musicians and filmmakers. He hungered for exposure to western Europe’s avant-garde and remained on the cutting edge among Estonian composers. From the initial influences of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, Pärt soon delved into serialism – perhaps the most strictly controlled compositional system – before shifting into free collage principles. Reception was mixed. Pärt felt some discomfort with his new direction, so he entered a period of self-imposed “contemplative silence” (1968-1971) during which he studied Medieval and Renaissance vocal music. His style changed noticeably, but it was the second such hiatus (1972-1976) that proved life altering. In those pivotal years Pärt found his voice: mystical, minimalist, and completely original, what he calls “tintinnabulation.”

This new technique opened the floodgates of inspiration. Several of the composer’s best works were written in 1977 immediately following the second contemplative silence. Tabula Rasa, Latin for “blank slate,” was composed in this year for Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer. Its two spacious movements, marked Ludus (“play” or “game”) and Silentium (“silence”), wonderfully epitomize the new direction Pärt was going, as his own comments about the first performance show: “It was beautiful, quiet and beautiful.” Hearing this 25-minute piece in live performance, it is hard not to recede into one’s self. Its austerity can move one to a deep state of reflection. In the rush of our daily lives, such artistic immediacy carries profound power and meaning.

© Jason Stell, 2024