...an excerpt from a booklet from one of our publications... 0029

In the early months of 1784 Mozart was at the peak of his popularity in Vienna. A succession of piano pupils filed into his apartment every morning, and more often than not he was required in the evening to perform, whether at a private house or at a concert. This left him the afternoons to compose the new music his aristocratic patrons and concert subscribers wanted to hear. To keep track he began a catalogue of his compositions, which he maintained for the rest of his life. Its early entries included three works he introduced at his concert in the Burgtheater on April 1, of which he wrote to his father: The concert I gave in the theatre was most successful. I composed two grand concertos and then a quintet, which called forth the very greatest applause: I myself consider it to be the best work I have ever composed.’ Mozart would, of course, have been keen to reassure his father, but the works he mentions offer strong evidence he did not have to exaggerate. Contemporaries noticed there was something new and different in his piano concertos of 1784, especially in how the wind instruments worked closely with and around the soloist. Of the two concertos he introduced with the quintet, K. 450 in B flat and K. 451 in D, the latter shows that in particular, with its interplay of piano with flute, oboe and bassoon. And this music would have been fresh in his mind, for he wrote the three works consecutively, all in March 1784, completing the quintet, with oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon, just two days before the concert. Almost certainly, nothing for the combination of piano exclusively with wind instruments had been written before, but in a sense the quintet was a natural outcome of the concertos it followed so