W.A. Mozart: The Chamber Concertos: 12, 13, 14. Holywell Music Room

Mozart yawned, shivered, and reached for his brand-new notebook.

The morning of Monday 9^th February 1784 was bright but freezing in Vienna. It was (and still is to this day) the coldest winter on record in Europe, with temperatures dipping below -20C, and the ice on the Danube was four feet thick. It had been like this since November. The Laki volcano that erupted in Iceland the previous year was the cause, but Mozart wasn’t to know that. In his and Constanze’s modest apartment in Judenplatz they had almost run out of wood to burn, and the ice on the river meant that boats carrying new stocks of fuel couldn’t reach the city.

Nevertheless, this was the morning that Mozart finished composing his 14^th Piano Concerto. We know this because it was also the first time in his life that he had bought a notebook to record his compositions, and this concerto is on page one. He blew on his fingers. The keys on his fortepiano felt like slivers of ice, and the only way he could stop the ink in his quill from freezing was to add brandy to it. But in that bleak midwinter, Mozart conjured spring with this richest, lightest and most joyful of compositions.

241 years later, in worryingly milder conditions, the Holywell Music Room played host to the same concerto, joined by its predecessors the 12^th and 13^th. The venue is ideal: completed just six years before Mozart was born, it sits, like him, on the boundary between baroque and classical. It doesn’t have the aristocratic panache of Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace, where you can hear Mozart’s greatest hits any day of the week like a Disney Parade. It’s modest, graceful and restrained. The musicians are illuminated by a couple of domestic standard lamps rather than the latest LED spotlights. And the acoustics are perfect. In this time capsule of cultured elegance, a string quartet from the English Chamber Orchestra, and soloist Cristian Sandrin, made a small, spellbound audience feel like those privileged Austrian music afficionados at Mozart’s first subscription concert.

You might think that three piano concertos in a row – nine movements in total – is stretching an audience’s endurance too far. But these pieces are so light, playful and nimble, and performed so effortlessly, you hardly notice you’re consuming them, like teaspoons of caviar on mini blinis. The 12^th is the simplest of the bunch. Officially still part of Mozart’s juvenilia, it has a call-and-response relationship between strings and piano. They perform in turn, passing melodies back and forth like footballers showing off on a training pitch. In the second movement, the piano plays alone for so long that it almost feels like a sonata. And in the third movement, the two sections play off each other as if providing the punchline to a witty, and slightly risqué, joke. Close your eyes, and you can almost hear Mozart tittering at the innocent naughtiness of it all.

The 13^th is more dramatic, with harsh swipes of the bow, and sweeping glissandos lifting the violinists briefly off their seats with excitement. At the piano, Cristian Sandrin remained impassive and serene. That old line of the Archduke’s from Amadeus (‘Too many notes, Mozart’) came to mind as the air was filled with harmonies bouncing off and dancing with each other. Sandrin’s control was immaculate. Even when playing only with his right hand, his left wafted above the keyboard, conducting and guiding its busier partner, and Mozart’s reply came just as quickly to mind: ‘There are just as many notes as there should be, Your Majesty.’

And finally the 14^th.

The reason Mozart bought a notebook in that terrible winter of 1783-4 was because he needed to be more organised about his work. Commissions from wealthy noblemen were drying up, so he devised the idea of offering subscriptions for his concerts. People could buy tickets in advance for a whole season, and the more generous donors would get better seats and even engraved copies of the manuscript to play at home. It was the first crowdfunding campaign, and it was a huge success. We still have the lists of subscribers, written in Mozart’s distinctively neat hand, and they read like a Who’s Who of Austrian Nobility in 1784. Look at all the Prinzesses, Comtes and Ambassadeurs! 

All three of these concertos featured at the subscription concerts. But it was the 14^th that captured the listeners’ imaginations. It’s now recognised as the first work of Mozart’s mature period, and even he was proud of it. He wrote to his father, describing it as ‘one of a quite peculiar kind’ and declaring that ‘it will make you sweat’ (an enticing promise that February).

Starting unusually in 3/4 time, the concerto lilts rather than leaps into action, and its melodies are more complex and unrestrained than the earlier works. With every composition, he moves further away from Bach and closer to Beethoven. The final movement is a classic Round, with the string quartet sharing the tune like campers round a bonfire, and the piano flowing like a thawed Danube. It’s pure music.

The subscription concerts soon lost their allure. The nobility moved on to other fashions, and by 1786 Mozart had returned to teaching. He was thirty years old, and five years from death. His family left Judenplatz, and as they ran out of money they moved from place to place in Vienna. There’s a department store where his last home used to be. But in the crisp air of Holywell Music Room, and beneath the expressive fingers of Cristian Sandrin, the winter of 1784 made us sweat again.