Steven Osborne

Mozart composed his last piano sonata, KV576, in Vienna in the summer of 1789. It was commissioned by King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, who asked Mozart to write six 'light' sonatas for his daughter. Pressed for time, Mozart only managed to write one sonata, and the piece was anything but 'light'. Its perfect synthesis of the gallant style and the polyphonic style demands extreme skill from the performer. Beethoven's Six Bagatelles, opus 126, were the last pieces he wrote for the piano. Although they are quite short, they are certainly not 'bagatelles' from the artistic point of view. Their complex, compact, aphoristic style is representative of the later Beethoven. Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is a suite of ten piano pieces, inspired by paintings by the architect and amateur painter Viktor Hartmann. The ten parts are welded together by means of a recurring 'promenade' motif. The British composer Sir Michael Tippett (b. 1905) wrote his Second Piano Sonata in 1962, immediately after his second opera, 'King Priam'. The sonata quotes motifs from the opera and shares the same rough, shrill sound idiom. It consists of a single movement, a mosaic of eight motifs that are fragmented, shortened, extended and played off against each other.