Mozart wrote his first concerto at the age of ten and completed his last a few weeks before his death. In the intervening twenty-five years he composed over fifty concertos for various instruments. The most numerous are, of course, those for the piano, which are the subject of a separate BBC Music Guide by Philip Radcliffe. This volume is dedicated to Mozart's other concertos--those for wind and stringed instruments--masterpieces such as the powerful Sinfonia Concertante in E flat and the lyrical Clarinet Concerto, or the Flute Concerto in G and the last two Horn Concertos, all perfect of their kind.

This early work on Mozart's Piano Concertos is both expensive and hard to find in its first edition. It contains analyses of the themes and structure of some of Mozart's greatest piano compositions. This is a fascinating work and thoroughly recommended for anyone interested in music theory. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

This study investigates the interactive relationship between the piano and the orchestra in Mozart's concertos by exploring the historical implications and hermeneutic potential of dramatic dialogue.

Mozart's piano concertos stand alongside his operas and symphonies as his most frequently performed and best loved music. They have attracted the attention of generations of musicologists who have explored their manifold meanings from a variety of viewpoints. In this study, John Irving brings together the various strands of scholarship surrounding Mozart's concertos including analytical approaches, aspects of performance practice and issues of compositional genesis based on investigation of manuscript and early printed editions. Treating the concertos collectively as a repertoire, rather than as individual works, the first section of the book tackles broad thematic issues such as the role of the piano concerto in Mozart's quasi-freelance life in late eighteenth-century Vienna, the origin of his concertos in earlier traditions of concerto writing; eighteenth-century theoretical frameworks for the understanding of movement forms, subsequent historical shifts in the perception of the concerto's form, listening strategies and performance practices. This is followed by a 'documentary register' which proceeds through all 23 original works, drawing together information on the source materials. Accounts of the concertos' compositional genesis, early performance history and reception are also included here, drawing extensively on the Mozart family correspondence and other contemporary reports. Drawing together and synthesizing this wealth of material, Irving provides an invaluable reference source for those already familiar with this repertoire.