One of my favorite pianists and one of my favorite Mozart piano concertos combine for a great experience.

Although most connect Friedrich Gulda with his interpretations of Beethoven, his renditions of the Mozart piano concertos are nearly as famous. A few of his interpretations including the concerto in this post are the featured ones in my music library and my YouTube channel.

Friedrich Gulda had a special connection for the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, so much even that he requested his own death fall on the birth date of the Austrian composer. To make it even more dramatic January 27, 2000 was the day of his death after suffering from a heart failure earlier.

There are two Mozart concertos that Gulda performed that I favor the most. One of them is the Piano Concerto No.26 in D Major, K.537, commonly known as the "Coronation" Concerto, though that name once again was not given by Mozart. Friedrich Gulda performs and conducts, a staple of his reputation, with the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra in the videos below.

1. Allegro

Part 1


Part 2

Mozart rarely named his compositions. The "Coronation" label was not of Mozart's will and the concerto itself was not written to express that occasion. However the Concerto gets the nickname from the performance of it at the Coronation of Leopold II as Holy Roman Emperor in 1790. Once again a name slowly evolves into the piece instead of the other way around. It is always better anyway to have a music speak for the name then the name influence the music.

2. Larghetto


The Concerto itself is not considered one of Mozart's "best" by the standards he established in his later Vienna concertos, also the "Coronation" concerto seems to be significantly smaller in the shadow of the final concerto, No.27 in B-flat Major, K.595. Nonetheless, its gallant style and beauty through all three movements has put the concerto in its own view as a favorite among pianists.

3. Allegretto


The Concerto has seen different light among critics in the past century. In the 1930s it was among the "best known and most frequently played" of Mozart's piano concertos according to Friedrich Blume, editor of the Eulenburg edition of the concerto. Ten years later and the perspective changed dramatically with Alfred Einstein's rather strong demotion of the concerto:

"It is very Mozartean, while at the same time it does not express the whole or even the half of Mozart."

"It is both brilliant and amiable, especially in the slow movemment; it is very simple, even primitive, in its relation between the solo and the tutti, and so completely easy to understand that even the nineteenth century always grasped it without difficulty."

Once again, in the later of the twentieth century, Alan Tyson in 1991 wrote that, even though the other concertos of Mozart had become "well known and often played." The K.537 concerto "retained a significant reputation among Mozart's work in the piano concerto genre."

The "Coronation" Concerto has even been suggested to have lingered into the early Romantic era and has even been commented on by Steven Ledbetter that the work looks to the early forces of Rachmaninoff. Quite a connection for the "little concerto that could," one of a supposedly lower quality. Though in dealing with Mozart, even the lower ranked works hardly could be considered that.