Mozart – Sinfonia Concertante (2025 Tobias Liu)

In his poem, “Essay on Joy Beginning with Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-Flat Major,” Jon Davis writes:

“Imagine Mozart, in the warm haze of his gift, blurting “Melody is simple!” then sitting at the piano to improvise a dozen.”

Mozart’s gift for melody, as Davis imagines, is on full display in the Sinfonia Concertante —  what writer Thomas May describes as “an extraordinary abundance of ideas and sonorities which pour out with a seeming effortlessness, like ripened fruit simply there to be plucked.” But the Sinfonia Concertante isn’t just Mozart at his melodic best: it stands apart in its symphonic grandeur and unsurpassed emotional depth, in its redefinition of the double concerto from a vehicle of virtuosity into one of drama and sensitive storytelling.

The Sinfonia Concertante features violin and viola as dual soloists in dialogue with the orchestra — it’s this equality among the three partners that creates the work’s dynamic sound world. Poet Patrick Mackie, in his book Mozart in Motion, portrays the viola part as a “reinterpretation [of] what soloistic music is meant to be. Far from rising above the orchestra as solo violins tend to do, its colours glint or glare or swim from right within the heart of the sound. It is like watching sunlight work its way through rich clouds.”

It’s an apt description for the opening of the concerto: after a two-minute orchestral exposition that unfurls inventively like an overture, idea after idea flowering and flowing from one to the next, the soloists glide in together almost imperceptibly on sustained high pitches, gradually warming into the foreground in a miraculous moment of sublimity. The violin and the viola then dart back and forth in a thrilling dialogue of wit and competition with each other and the orchestra.

The second movement — a tour de force of operatic expression with an emotional depth speculated to be Mozart’s grief following the death of his mother the previous year — transforms the conversation into a heart-wrenching interplay. In its opening, you can almost hear the cries of grief from the solo violin and the corresponding words of consolation from the viola, and as the dialogue progresses, there is a tenderness and longing, an intimacy, between the two voices that seems to weave grief and solace together so seamlessly that, by the end, they become inseparable. For me, it’s one of the greatest movements in all of music.

Then, suddenly, we’re back in the world of dancing sunlight and, as May drew from Hesse’s ethereal Immortals, “laughter without an object… simply light and lucidity.” The third movement is pure joy, irrepressible by neither the “maestoso” of the first movement nor the tragedy of the second, and it springs forward, barely pausing to catch its breath before tumbling gracefully and merrily into a spirited conclusion. In the closing scene of Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, the little prince tells the pilot before departing: “you, only you, will have stars that can laugh… it will be as if, in place of the stars, I had given you a great number of little bells that knew how to laugh.” The finale is these laughing stars captured — effervescent bursts of joy that shimmer and sparkle.

I love this piece, and Erin and I are beyond excited to share it with you. We hope you will enjoy it as much as we do.

— Tobias Liu ’26

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