MOZART VARIATIONS AND SONATAS FOR PIANO AND VIOLIN/3 Presented by Liszt Academy

The violin-piano pairing has been one of the most utilized duos from the Rococo to the present day, with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart writing no fewer than 36 works in this format. With his piano-violin sonatas, the composer, who was born in Salzburg but spent the second half of his life in Vienna, fashioned a bridge between the structural mode popular in early Classicism, in which the violin virtually had a subordinate role, and mature Viennese Classicism, which afforded equality between the two instruments. Sonatas featuring here in the third Complete Works Live recital represent the intermediate stage in this evolution. Amongst the sonatas, which were published in Vienna in 1781, there is still an early work that treated the violin as merely a ‘second string’, alongside a sonata that considers the two instruments as being of equal worth. The first sonata of the evening (K. 306) was forged out of material from a violin-piano double concerto that remained unfinished.