Like the symphonies of Beethoven, Mozart's piano concertos constitute an extraordinary body of work that will never disappear from our culture. Yet despite widespread recognition of their importance, they still present many interpretive problems. In 1989, the Michigan MozartFest brought expert performers, instrument makers, critics, music theorists, and musicologists together for the first symposium devoted exclusively to Mozart's piano concertos. The twenty-one essays in Mozart's Piano Concertos, culled from that event, richly broaden our understanding of this corpus.
The volume's...

This book traces the emergence of the orchestra from 16th-century string bands to the "classical" orchestra of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries. Ensembles of bowed stringed instruments, several players per part plus continuo and wind instruments, were organized in France in the mid-17th century and then in Rome at the end of the century. The prestige of these ensembles and of the music and performing styles of their leaders, Jean-Baptiste Lully and Arcangelo Corelli, caused them to be imitated elsewhere, until by the late 18th century, the orchestra had become a pan-European...