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Mitsuko Uchida will lead from the piano when she appears March 20 with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
When Mitsuko Uchida returns to Chicago, this time with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, she will be performing the works of one of her signature composers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
While known for her wide repertoire, Uchida is acclaimed as a Mozart specialist. In recent years, she has recorded Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos. 9, 18-21, 23-24 and 27. One of these discs, a 2009 Decca release of the Concertos Nos. 23 and 24, won a Grammy for best instrumental soloist performance in 2011.
For a Symphony Center Presents Chamber Music concert March 20, Uchida will appear as soloist and conductor in the works featured on that Grammy-winning disc, Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos. 23 and 24. Also on the program are four Fantasias by Henry Purcell. Uchida often leads Mozart’s piano concertos from the keyboard, as the composer himself did.
On why his music suits this approach, “I think it’s to do with Mozart’s idea of how the concerto form works,” she said in an interview with ClassicFM. “From Beethoven onwards, composers saw the concerto as a kind of contest between the soloist and the orchestra. But with Mozart, they’re very much partners. The music is like an ongoing conversation between the piano and the orchestra. Either one might take a different line on this idea or that one, but the general mood is one of mutual agreement.”
Though Uchida almost always performs Mozart on a modern concert grand, not on a 18th-century keyboard, she feels comfortable with that choice. “For me this is not too much of an issue [because of] the size of our concert halls today,” she said. “I don’t believe an early piano can make enough sound to fill them. The halls that Mozart played in were a lot smaller. I’ve played his music on a period instrument in that kind of listening space, and it works well. Also, I have a square piano, one of the really early kind, in my home in London, and I play it there. But only at home!
As for whether Uchida has a favorite Mozart piano concerto, she is emphatic: “It’s not possible to say this, absolutely not! But I do feel that something remarkable happened to his music between the B-flat Concerto, K. 456 (No.18), which is so lovely, and the D Minor Concerto, K. 466 (No. 20). This one, and K. 467 in C (No. 21), the one we now call ‘Elvira Madigan,’ everything is suddenly in a different dimension. Mozart has made this astonishing leap. There’s an immensity about this music and in the great concertos that followed. And then in the last one, K. 595 in B-flat (No. 27), his style becomes simpler again. This, too, is something very special.”
