Piano Concerto in B flat major

Since he was so much more highly valued in Prague Mozart must have thought about moving there from Vienna. One of many reasons why he didn’t is that Prague musical life was too restricted for a composer of his ambitions and his abilities. Bohemia was, in fact, a net exporter of musicians who, unable to make a living in their own country, were attracted by the opportunities offered by a great musical centre such as Vienna. One such musician was Mozart’s older contemporary Josef Stepán, who settled in Vienna in 1741 and achieved much success there.

Although Mozart and Stepán almost certainly knew each other, and although they were both prolific composers of keyboard concertos, there is little evidence of any kind of exchange of musical ideas between them. Certainly, no one could mistake Stepán’s Piano Concerto in B flat - which is thought to have been written in the 1780s - for a work by Mozart. The long, brooding slow introduction to the first movement is a feature which, though characteristic of Stepán, has no parallel in Mozart’s concertos. Both the structure and the scoring of the succeeding Allegro, where the strings are effectively reduced to a solo quartet at one point, might seem almost eccentric in comparison with more familiar Mozart examples. While Mozart would not have written a slow movement like Stepán’s Andante con moto, which is a sustained piano solo with no intervening episode for the orchestra, the closing Allegro is nearer to what we now think of as the classical Viennese mainstream. As for the cadenzas, the present edition by Howard Picton supplies appropriate material from Stepán’s collection of Cadenze, fermate e capriccii.