Mozart's Twenty-Third, Rethought

There is a particular danger in the A major Concerto: that its beauty will be mistaken for comfort. Last Thursday's performance refused the temptation, treating the keyboard part as a conversation partner of equal rank.

The cadenza of the first movement was dispatched with a wit that bordered on impertinence, and the orchestra responded in kind. In the Adagio, the piano's lone line seemed to suspend time itself.

This was Mozart as intimacy rather than monument — small in scale, enormous in consequence.