Jean and Kenneth Wentworth met while both were studying with the late Irwin Freundlich at The Juilliard School. Jean Wentworth, a Walter W. Naumburg Award winner, appears as soloist and chamber-music pianist (in recent years, she has performed the Mozart Concerto K. 488 and the Bartok Concerto No. 3, and she will be playing the Brahms D minor Concerto later this season). However, the Wentworths decided to focus upon the four-hand repertoire in the mid 1960s when they were senior Fulbrighters in India. Since then, they have devoted themselves both to the distinguished traditional literature for the medium and to enlarging its contemporary repertoire. They have performed widely in this country and Canada, and in Europe and the Middle East. The Wentworths have made recordings of the complete four-hand works of Mozart, the Czerny Concerto for Piano Four Hands, and various contemporary compositions by Vincent Persichetti, Robert Starer and Meyer Kupferman. The couple has also recorded the Grand Duo and B minor Variations of Schubert, and they are specialists in the four-hand compositions of the 19th-Century American Louis Moreau Gottschalk. They were heard in concert in Florida and for the Chicago Chamber Music Society in the 2003-04 season. Jean Wentworth is a longtime member of the music faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. Kenneth Wentworth retired from the College some years ago to devote full time to direction of Jonathan Wentworth Associates, Ltd., a leading concert management based in Mount Vernon, New York, which he founded in 1978.
Concert Program:
Jean and Kenneth Wentworth
in a program of sonatas for one piano, four hands
by
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(1756-1791)
Sonata in B flat, K. 358/186c (1774)
Allegro
Adagio
Molto presto
Sonata in C, K.521 (1787)
Allegro
Andante
Allegrettto
Intermission
Sonata in D, K. 381 /123a (1772)
Allegro
Andante
Allegro molto
Sonata in F, K. 497 (1786)
Adagio: Allegro di molto
Andante
Allegro
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
4 Sonatas for Piano, Four Hands
It could be suggested that the history of all music for two players at one keyboard began on 13 May, 1765 in Hickford’s Great Room, Brewer Street, London. On that day, the then nine-year-old Wolfgang and his sister ‘Nannerl’ performed together on a magnificent new two-manual harpsichord built by Burkhard Tschudi for Frederick the Great. Mozart’s first four-hand sonata, K. 19d in C major, was probably written especially for the occasion. Though several unpublished duet sonatas had been written earlier, one is tempted to accept a proud statement said to have been written in a subsequent letter by Leopold Mozart, ‘ …up till now, no four-hand sonata had been composed anywhere.’
K. 19d, not discovered until 1921, is a full-blown work which anticipates some of the procedures used in the later four-hand sonatas; however, unlike Symphony No. 1, actually composed several months earlier, it lacks the vibrant immediacy which would merit public performance. Other early four-hand works appear to have been lost. The finished works include a set of Variations in G, K. 501 and two ‘really sublime’ Fantasies (Donald Francis Tovey) which, though written for mechanical instruments, were transcribed very early for piano duet.
There is considerable range of style within the four sonatas on this program; the two works, in D and B flat, from Mozart’s adolescence, seem scarcely related to the other two, from his maturity, beyond their title and movement divisions. Neither of them tend to penetrate emotionally below the surface of, say, an operatic orchestra or a Turkish military band (as in the finales of K. 358 and K.381, respectively). However, the B flat Sonata has a considerable, not to say, treacherous, sophistication, notably in its elegant interweaving of dialogue.
Of the mature works, the F major Sonata is acclaimed as a masterpiece by virtually every authority on Mozart, including Tovey, who in one of his Essays, calls it one of the composer’s ‘greatest instrumental works’. It is easy to agree; one can mention the contrapuntal mastery, notable even in the context of Mozart’s later works, or the noble, soaring lines of the Andante; the composition achieves a richness of sonority which, especially when coupled with a rhythmic and tonal urgency – as in the development of the first movement – can only be called Beethovenian.
In the limpid grace of the Sonata in C, K.521, can be found an ineffable Mozartian sophistication. The bass register of the instrument is richly utilized melodically, and such detailed markings as dolce, crescendo, pp and astonishingly frequent ffs are a striking contrast to the straightforward fortes and pianos in the earlier works. In the C major Sonata, particularly, a seemingly gemütlich ambience may be transformed, with a kind of Mozartian alchemy, into poignant resignation, or even despair.
The manuscripts of both K.497 and K. 521 are in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; one can observe the generally pristine appearance of K. 521, broken by bars which have been crossed out and revised, as it were, en passant; A. Hyatt King found it to have been written hastily. Of course the composer is well-known for both haste and certainty in his writing; more unusual is the ms of the F major Sonata, which contains several substantive alterations which provide a relatively rare glimpse into the creative process of this peerless master.
The manuscripts of K. 381 and K. 358 were retained by Mozart’s sister Marianne until the composer’s death – one reason we can be certain their musical collaboration must have extended well beyond their performances as youthful prodigies. As an adult, Mozart is known to have played his duets with Hummel and with the aged sister of Padre Martini, among others.
One can find more than a casual relationship between portions of four-hand works and other compositions. Following a pattern not unusual for Mozart, the final movement of the C major Sonata seems to be based, if perhaps unconsciously, on the Rondo of the Johann Christian Bach duet sonata from the 1770s which is in the same key. The Andante of K.497 is a variant of the slow movement of the well-known horn concerto K. 495 from the same period. Finally, the Adagio of the early B flat Sonata is thematically connected to the opening of the youthful quartet, K. 160.
As a body of work, the four-hand sonatas are heard far less often than the solo sonatas or indeed the brilliant sonata in D for 2 pianos, K. 448. Not only do they reward study, however; they are also some of the most appealing works of this great man -- Jean Wentworth
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