Piano Concerto No. 17 in G Major

By 1784, Mozart was the darling of the music-loving Viennese public, commanding a loyal audience for concerts at which he performed a breathtaking sequence of brand new piano concertos. That year alone he unveiled six such works—four of them between the months of February and April, of which the G Major Concerto is the fourth and perhaps the finest of these works. He may have granted the premiere to his pupil Barbara Ployer, in a concert in June that also included the Piano and Wind Quintet (K452) and the Sonata for Two Pianos (K448), although there is a theory that he launched it himself two months earlier in an equally mouthwatering concert that he shared with the visiting violin virtuoso Regina Strinasacchi. The lightly marching “Allegro” introduces a series of melodies before the piano enters and engages in the almost operatic repartee with the orchestra that had become a trademark of Mozart’s concerto style. The meditative central “Andante” explores richly contrasting harmonic territory beneath its song-like surface, while the finale is a set of variations based on a perky tune supposedly sung by Mozart’s pet starling.