Last night at Curtis(1) Mozart 's sonata OPus 331

Consider this is my first time sitting in a concert hall in three or four months, I will write a few thoughts down.

The students played three pieces, Mozart ' sonata Opus 331, Frank 's violin piano sonata in A major and Chopin 's piano concerto E minor. I am very familiar with the three pieces, with the two piano piece I played myself and the violin piece that I heard thousands of time in my lonely hours in the lab.


Mozart 's sonata Opus 331 is a lovely piece. The first movement is a variation of a rather nonchalant and yet graceful theme. It has this very careless sentiment that is usually not considered very Mozartian. The reason is that its first movement is in slow tempo though the last few variations tend to speed up. Unlike most other Mozart 's sonata that seizes you right away. This piece requires you really listen to it and appreciate its transient beauty.

The theme was used by the movie star/ director Robert Redford both in his movies "out of Africa" and " horsewhispers". Using the exact piece twice in movies whose production time were separated in 15 years showed how much Robert Redford, a rather tasteful actor, loved Mozart. I kind of know why he loves it. The music is so pure and naive and yet contains all sorts of scales of human emotions through its rather tedious variations around this nonchalant theme. Robert Redford, whose roles in both movies are kind of outsider of the mundane world, suits very well of the mood of this piece.


The Korean girl did a good job in producing very delicate and controlled sound of Mozart. However, she lost the audience 's attention by not putting together the variations as whole piece. You felt like she is playing one piece after another and since Mozart has a very prolonged development of his theme through carefully designed subtle change in each variation, it requires great artistic skills to keep the dynamics through out the whole piece. So her playing is rather plain and forgetful. But the bottomline is that Mozart 's extremely challenge to a young pianist.