MOZART: VIENNESE STAR
Image Credit: © Helen White
GENIUS AND WIT IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT.
We launch our 10th anniversary season with a program of sparkling chamber works from the years of Mozart’s rise to stardom in 1780s Vienna.
Available by subscription at selected locations. Single tickets now on sale for all venues unless otherwise indicated.
PROGRAM
HAYDN
String Quartet Op. 33 No. 5 in G major How do you do?
BOCCHERINI
String Quartet Op. 32 No. 5 in G Minor
MOZART
String Quartet No. 19 in C major K. 465 Dissonance
PERFORMANCES
Select a location & date from the list below to book.
+ Canberra | 10 February | 7 PM
Thursday 10 February at 7pm, Wesley Music Centre BOOK
+ Berry | 11 February | 7 PM
Friday 11 February at 7pm, Berry School of Arts BOOK
+ Southern Highlands | 12 February | 4 PM
Saturday 12 February at 4pm, Burrawang School of Arts BOOK
+ Australian Digital Concert Hall | 14 March | 8 PM
Monday 14 March at 8pm, Australian Digital Concert Hall BOOK
+ Sydney | 19 March | 7 PM
Saturday 19 March at 7pm, Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House BOOK
+ Armidale | 20 March | 7 PM
We launch our 10th anniversary season with a program of sparkling chamber works from the years of Mozart’s rise to stardom in 1780s Vienna.
In 1782, at age 25, Mozart decided it was time for his star to shine. Shrugging off his stultifying patron and the boring city of his father, he had set himself up in the music capital of the world, won “Viennese Idol” as keyboard virtuoso, fallen in love, written a risqué smash hit opera set in a harem, and was filling his set-lists with brand new piano concerti for himself to play to adoring fans. Somehow, he found time to lend his viola talents to an eminent but amateur string quartet with a certain Joseph Haydn on first.
This proved to be more than the start of a beautiful friendship. Reading through Haydn’s newly composed set of six Op. 33 quartets left a deep impression on the younger composer and over the next three years he resolved to dedicate a set of his own to his mentor. The six ‘Haydn Quartets’ were all of great personal significance to Mozart. In the beautiful dedication page, he calls them his children and modestly entrusts them, with all their “faults”, to Joseph’s benign paternal care. It goes without saying that Haydn found nothing to correct in this sublime tribute.
The last of them, the famous Dissonance quartet, with its startlingly original adagio opening, is the gravitational centre of this concert, in which you’ll also hear the fifth of Haydn’s Op. 33 How do you do? and the contemporaneous fifth of Boccherini’s Op. 32 quartets. Dating from his time in Spain, the latter displays all the vibrant colours we have come to love in Boccherini, including a spectacularly virtuosic violin capriccio in the finale.
Haydn’s object lesson in the form he pioneered, encapsulates the clever, funny, and beautiful nature that so obviously won the heart of Vienna’s star ascendant.