Mozart Violin Concertos No. 4 K218 & No. 5 K224

Speaking of his admiration for these works, Znaider said: ‘For me Mozart is the greatest composer, because he was able to express everything that Mahler was able to express in one hour and twenty minutes, that Wagner could do in five hours, Bruckner in seventy-two minutes, in twenty-three, twenty-four minutes. He could express the yearning and the desire and the pain of human existence and yet it felt so easy.’

Although the prevailing image of Mozart the performer is that of a pianist, the part played by the violin in his early development as a musician was hardly less important.

How, indeed, could it be otherwise when his father and teacher, Leopold, was the author of Violinschule, one of the eighteenth century’s most influential treatises on violin technique? Accounts of the child-prodigy’s triumphs around Europe suggest that, at that stage at least, he was equally proficient on violin and keyboard, and right into the mid-1770s his letters home to his family contained reports of public appearances as a violinist.

‘I played Vanhal’s Violin Concerto in B flat, which was unanimously applauded’, he wrote from Augsburg in 1777. ‘In the evening at supper I played my Strasbourg Concerto, which went like oil. Everyone praised my beautiful, pure tone.’

Nikolaj Znaider, Violin Soloist & Conductor
London Symphony Orchestra