The concert piano: gigantic, powerful, super-polished and a fixed instrumental technology that long ago reached the summit of its development, the ultimate instrument for repertoire from JS Bach to Unsuk Chin.
In Mozart's time, the piano was in a state of flux...
But it wasn’t always like that. In Vienna in the late-18th century, pianos were in a state of flux and development, and the most avant-garde composers were experimenting with the newest technology they could get their hands on. For Mozart, who arrived in the city in 1781 to set out on a career as a freelance musician, that meant a symbiosis between what the new pianos could do and how he pitched himself into a world of public concert-giving.
The concertos he wrote for himself to play make a unique repertoire in which the white-heat of his composition matches the spontaneity of the performances. His father Leopold made a rare visit to Vienna and was there for the first performance of the D minor Concerto, K466, in 1785: the finale was sightread in the concert, while the piano (which included a pedal-board, allowing Mozart to play another musical line in the bass with his feet, like the organ’s pedals) was carted across town.
Those are conditions of controlled chaos you wouldn’t necessarily want to replicate today, but you’d surely want to experience the concerto on a keyboard like the one Mozart was so inspired by. Wouldn’t you?
Massive grand pianos are not as versatile as the instruments used by Mozart, Bach and Beethoven...
Apparently not. Instead of the tactility, range of colour and contrast that instruments like Mozart’s were all about, classical music culture has developed the illusion that massive grand pianos are the right tools to use for this repertoire. They are not. They are big, beautiful, sonorous and capable of delicacy as well as power, but modern grand pianos are simply not as versatile as the instruments that Mozart – or CPE Bach, or Beethoven, or de Montgeroult - composed for and loved playing on. Any performance of this repertoire that uses a modern grand piano instead of a fortepiano is a transcription of this music, not a performance based in the soundworld that composers like Mozart knew.
Fortepianos are about finding freedom...
This isn’t a question of dusty historical fidelity. Just the opposite: as fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout reveals in his recordings of Mozart’s concertos – or, for instance, Olga Pashchenko in her Mozart albums - fortepianos are about finding the freedom that Mozart knew, not only in how the keyboards sound and how they relate to the rest of the orchestra, but also in the fact that the notes that Mozart left in his scores aren’t always fully formed pieces.
The scores of his concertos are often more like kits for performance, in which the pianist, and the orchestral players, should be involved and inspired to create themselves, in solos and cadenzas, to bring to life the dialogue and dynamism that these concertos are all about.
So here’s my advice to pianists: forget the Steinways, and get free, get wild… and get a fortepiano!
