Ivan Hewett's Classic 50 No 23: Mozart: Grazioso from Piano Trio in E major But Mozart loved them, especially the E major one that contains this movement. He sent it as a thank you to his friend and fellow Freemason Michael Puchberg, whom he was always touching for a loan. This little Grazioso is laid out with the formal perfection of an 18th-century garden. But unlike a garden, you can feel the content - the little curlicues of melody, and harmonic surprises - pushing against the frame. So perhaps a conversation is a better metaphor. Each little statement is rounded off and balanced by another that is sometimes an echo, sometimes a reply - but usually both at once (it's part of music's mystery that it can combine these two things). Some say the music's delicate emotional colour reminds them of Watteau's dreamy countryside scenes, with guitarists and clowns and whispering couples. To me there's a kind of innocent, toy-soldiers pathos in the music, hiding just under its graceful surface. It's no surprise to discover that Chopin was especially fond of this piece. The performers in this recording are the Kungsbacka Trio. 00.00 The piano launches things with a delicate melody, beautifully caught by pianist Simon Crawford-Phillips. 00.17 We hear it again, with the violinist and cellist adding a commentary. But now Mozart wants a more emphatic close, so at 00.31 he adds a little touch of harmonic pathos. This makes the ending at 00.38 more satisfying (because the music has further to travel to get home, harmonically speaking). 00.39 That was the conversation's opening gambit. Now we get the reply, which winds its way to a close at... 00.58 But because everything has to be balanced and symmetrical, the piano-only answer is repeated here by the full trio. 1.17 Something new happens in the piano, echoed soon afterwards by the strings. At 1.35 the music starts to wind its way back to the opening tune, which reappears at 1.51. Mozart realises a complete repeat would be tedious, so he cuts the whole 2nd half. 2.11 Now he makes a new contrast by giving us the melody in the minor mode. 2.58 A long bass note tells us the return of the opening melody is only just round the corner. 3.45 We can feel the end approaching, but Mozart complicates this ending section, which takes on a life of its own (classical composers love this kind of game). So the ending needs its own ending, beginning at 4.24. Mozart: Menuetto: Allegretto, Trios 1 - Trio 2 from Divertimento for String Trio This isn't quite the first piece ever written for string trio (i.e. violin, viola, cello), but it's certainly the first masterpiece. There aren't many, because the medium is tricky to manage; the extra violin in a quartet makes life a lot easier. Like the Piano Trio above, it was written for Michael Puchberg, who really is one of classical music's unsung heroes for constantly bailing out the impecunious Mozart. Like all divertimenti, it has six movements, which include 2 examples of the graceful waltz-like dance called the Menuetto, each with its contrasting Trio. The second actually has two Trios, so the form is Menuetto (00.00) (notice the mock horn-calls at the beginning), Trio 1 (1.00), Menuetto again (2.19), Trio 2 (3.19), and finally Menuetto (4.20). It's played by here by the Trio Zimmermann. Mozart: Larghetto from Clarinet Quintet The range of moods in Mozart's chamber music is just as vast as in his orchestral music or operas. The slow movement of the Clarinet Quintet strikes a note of resigned beauty heard nowhere else. Romantics have taken this as a sign that Mozart knew his end was near, but that won't wash. When he wrote this piece in 1789 he was about to start work on his opera Cosi fan Tutte, and had two full years to live. The clarinet's melody is heavenly, but just as affecting are the ribbons of violin scales over a descending bass starting at 2.29 (and listen out for their return at 3.15, now embodied in the lovely liquid tones of clarinetist Martin Frost). Mozart: Quartet in D minor K 421 Minuet and Trio Another Minuetto & Trio, but whereas the one above is rumbustious and swinging, this one has a sense of high tragedy. It comes from a set of six string quartets Mozart dedicated in 1783 to Joseph Haydn. They give the lie to the idea that Mozart just wrote his music straight down, as if from dictation. He says in the dedication that they were the result of "long and arduous labour." They're certainly fantastically well-made, with every edge rounded off. There's a startling change of mood for the Trio at 1.42, which makes the return of the Minuetto at 2.56 seem even more stark and pitiless.