Fazıl Say - Turkish March (Türk Marşı)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Piano Sonata No 11 in A - Major, K.331

III. Alla Turca – Allegretto

The last movement, "Alla Turca", popularly known as the "Turkish March", is often heard on its own and is one of Mozart's best-known piano pieces.Mozart himself titled the rondo "Alla Turca". It imitates the sound of Turkish Janissary bands, the music of which was much in vogue at that time. Various other works of the time imitate this Turkish style, including Mozart's own opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail. In Mozart's time, the last movement was sometimes performed on pianos built with a "Turkish stop", allowing it to be embellished with extra percussion effects. The form of the rondo is A-B-C-D-E-C-A-B-C-coda, with each section (except the coda) being repeated twice.

Recorded during rehearsal at Enka Kültür Sanat

Video by Mustafa Toygun Özdemir

Composing is always a form of improvisation: with ideas, with musical particles, with imaginary shapes. And it is in this sense that the artistic itinerary and the world-view of the Turkish composer and pianist Fazıl Say should be understood. For it was from the free forms with which he became familiar in the course of his piano lessons with the Cortot pupil Mithat Fenmen that he developed an aesthetic outlook that constitutes the core of his self-conception as a composer. Fazıl Say has been touching audiences and critics alike for more than twenty-five years in a way that has become rare in the increasingly materialistic and elaborately organised classical music world. Concerts with this artist are something else. They are more direct, more open, more exciting; in short, they go straight to the heart. And the same may be said of his compositions.