Mozart's piano concertos span the whole of his creative life and are viewed by many as the highpoint of his instrumental achievement. Their wide diversity of approaches and emphases show Mozart's remarkable fecundity and his ability to match the style of his musical material to the scale of the work, or to the performing means at hand.

Mozart's Concerto in E-flat, K. 482, was one of three concertos intended for a series of Lenten subscription concerts given in Vienna in 1786. While its companion works K. 488 and K. 491 were not completed until March, the E-flat Concerto received its premiere at a concert aiding the pension fund of the Viennese Tonkünstler-Societät on December 23, 1785. The main attraction on this occasion was Dittersdorf's oratorio Esther, and Mozart was relegated to performing his Concerto in the break between the two halves of the oratorio.

The E-flat Concerto stems from a busy creative period. It is contemporaneous with the opera buffa Le nozze di Figaro, and operatic gestures and emotional extremes are absorbed into the instrumental writing, particularly in the slow movement. This E-flat Concerto was the first of Mozart's piano concertos to include the clarinet, and the breadth of the orchestral sonority is further enhanced by the inclusion of trumpets and drums. [...]

The Concerto in D, K. 537, is Mozart's penultimate concerto for piano. He completed it in 1788 and played it in Frankfurt in October 1790, at the time of the coronation festivities for Leopold II. The manuscript seems to have been written out somewhat in haste, and the left-hand piano part is largely missing, probably because the composer himself was to be the soloist. In addition, the woodwinds, trumpets and drums were not conceived as an integral part of the work but were an "ad libitum" augmentation. The version of the concerto known today is that of the first edition, published in 1794 by Johann André, who was also responsible for the epithet "Coronation."

The D Major Concerto displays a musical straightforwardness that is set in relief by complexity of its immediate predecessors, the six masterworks written between 1785 and 1786. Its limpid grace and untroubled clarity, while not deeply moving, are nevertheless highly polished and musically convincing. The concerto is conceived on a grand scale, the dramatic gestures of the previous several concertos being replaced by material that lends itself to brilliant rather than introspective pianistic effects. [...]

Elizabeth A. Wright