There's a lot of truth to this famous New Yorker cartoon:
It is hard to argue with a banal viewpoint that Mozart's music is heavenly, some kind of celestial harps... But I always sensed something darker, perhaps even tragic, behind this heavenly bliss. I was surprised to learn that I'm not the only one from Sasha Izbitser's story about his teacher who, upon learning that Sasha was working on one of the Mozart's pieces, asked him - Aren't you scared? I kept remembering this when I was studying his D minor Fantasy, there are certain turns of thought in it that literally send chills down my spine, even after umpteenth attempt to play it correctly. I'm not sure I'm able to convey that feeling when I play this piece - you be the judge
There are of course minor flaws here, including purely visual (one of my cameras slid down a bit...) but generally I feel that musically this did not turn out too badly.
Interestingly, nobody really knows how this piece should be played. Mozart started writing it when he moved to Vienna, he was 26 at the time (in 1782). There he for the first time got to study music of Bach and Handel (he had an acquaintance who was a big fan of Baroque music and had texts), and many people find that the beginning of this D minor fantasy technically resembles the first C major prelude from the Well-Tempered clavier, and just as that prelude some people play it very slow (listen how Emil Gilels plays it), some play it much faster (Mozart simply says Andante). But the most interesting thing is that no one knows how this piece really ends: Mozart never performed it, the manuscript was only found after his death, even his sister did not see it before, and in that original manuscript everything ends on an A major (dominant) chord (at 5:50 in my video) which simply requires that the music goes on somehow. Apparently Mozart meant this piece to be an introduction to something else but nobody knows for sure. When after many years these manuscripts were published for the first time, one pastor, a big Mozart fan and a friend of the publisher's, created a ten-measure ending for this piece and this is how everyone plays it ever since. Well, not everyone - for example Mitsuko Uchida instead returns to the beginning, back to D minor...
Long ago, I learned to play the Turkish March but forgot that by now. But another piece stayed with me - the set of variations in C major on an old French song which is now known to every child as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (I hear that this piece is very popular in China and is known there as Twinkle Twinkle Sonata). I learned that piece in order to play it as a set of exercises, in lieu of scales that I hate so much, and I still do this regularly. Interestingly, as my skill level increases, I keep finding new depths in this piece, things that used to be difficult now seem easy but things that I didn't think were difficult, and those that I simply didn't notice, now seem daunting. I hope that my growth will continue and Mozart will continue to reveal more mysteries to me in this piece. Here's how it sounds now in my rendition:
The crackling sound in the beginning during the "Tema" is our heating system turning on, and yes I mangled the last variation but not everyone will listen all the way to the end...
Mozart wrote this piece in early 1780s, about the same time as the D-minor fantasy above (and he had heard the song itself when he was in Paris a few years before). At that time he quit his post at the Salzburg archbishop's court, and started making a living as a composer and performer, and in those days it was common during concerts to give the player a theme and see him produce variations on the spot. But I cannot imagine that anyone, not even Mozart, could produce these particular variations on the spot - they are too good, and they have too many internal links. If you listen closely, you'll see that the first four variations develop the theme using various rhythmic patterns, then variation five introduces a new idea - chromatic descent - which is developed in the next two variations, then there's a minor-major pair (a common device at the time), and then suddenly there's the most tender adagio instead of the expected bravura finale, and only then comes the finale - it seems impossible to come up with all of that in an instant, although who knows... These internal links, by the way, is what I find the most daunting here, I have to learn how to emphasize these common elements but I'm not good enough yet. I'll focus on just trying to play the whole thing evenly.