bristol international classical season 2015/16

fri 15 jan 2016, 7.30pm english baroque soloists with sir john eliot gardiner the majesty of mozart

Conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner

Mozart Symphony No. 39 Mozart Symphony No. 40 Mozart Symphony No. 41 ‘Jupiter’

Tickets: £42, £36, £30, £24 students £8.50, under 18s £1 incl. booking fee

bristol international classical season 2015/16

Editor of BBC Music Magazine Oliver Condy sheds some light on the circumstances surrounding the great works that feature in the Bristol International Classical Season 2015-16 at Colston Hall. These bite-sized programme notes and accompanying videos cut to the heart of the music, allowing you to get that little bit more from your classical experience.

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Experience classical music for less Saver seats £10 including booking fee – ask box office for details. Save up to 30% on tickets when you book for 3 or more international classical season concerts1788 was something of an ‘annus horribilis’ for Mozart. It was a

painful fall from the grace that had buoyed him in previous years – suddenly, at the height of his creative powers he found himself sinking into obscurity. Despite its huge success in Prague the previous year, his opera Don Giovanni, adored by the emperor and treasured by Josef Haydn, could barely muster an audience in Vienna, where Mozart now lived, despite he and his librettist Da Ponte making sizeable musical and editorial changes to the racy material to suit Viennese sensibilities. Mozart was reduced to writing begging letters to fellow Mason Michael Puchberg in which he wrote, ‘…I still owe you 8 ducats; but in addition to the fact that I am at the moment not in a position to pay this back, my trust in you is so great that I venture to ask you to help me out only until next week…’. Times were hard for all musicians, in fact: the Austro-Turkish War of 1787 had stripped the aristocracy of a great deal of their spending money, money that would normally have gone towards supporting musicians, commissioning works and staging concerts. And it was under these circumstances and suffering from depression, as some scholars have claimed, that Mozart composed his three greatest symphonies – and the last symphonies he would ever write – Nos 39, 40 and 41. The achievement seems all the

VIDEO: Jonathan James and Oliver Condy delve into Mozart’s final three symphonies, written in just one summer Watch this video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av2DebbfYOk

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Three masterworks conducted by a maestro magician who never fails to cast a spell. Concluding with the Jupiter Symphony, this Mozart trilogy is out of this world.

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bristol international classical season 2015/16

wed 13 jan, 7.30pm

stephen johnson insight and english piano triothe lantern

Stephen Johnson Insight Mozart Piano Trio in G K.564 Mozart Piano Trio in E K.542

Tickets: £9 - £13 incl. booking fee (Tickets £9 incl. bf when bought with a ticket to the English Baroque Soloists). CAVATINA free tickets available.

bristol international classical season 2015/16

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The English Piano Trio resumes last year’s survey of Mozart’s always engaging piano trios. Like the symphonies themselves, the scintillating G major K.564 and K.542 in E (one of Mozart’s favourites) were composed over that productive summer of 1788.

more astonishing when you consider that No. 39, a work full of exhuberance and invention was completed in between those letters to Puchberg. The three symphonies were written in a creative spurt during the summer and are remarkable for their scope and ambition, Mozart transforming the symphonic genre from what was then regarded as background courtly accompaniment to something akin to a profound musical argument. We still don’t know today why or for whom Mozart wrote these three masterpieces, but recent speculation has suggested he might have been inspired by Haydn’s ‘Paris’ Symphonies and was eager to emulate their greatness. They might have been, in effect, Mozart’s private, personal mission, another step in his musical development. We just don’t know, and nor do we know whether they were performed in his lifetime or not, and how they were received.

Mozart Symphony No. 39 Today, however, Mozart’s last three symphonies form a cornerstone of the orchestral repertoire. And they are as different from each other as any of Beethoven’s symphonies are contrasting. No. 39 begins grandly and majestically enough in the solid key of E-flat before the mood soon darkens and the listener is cast into an abyss by one of the most shocking – and sublime – harmonic clashes in all music. Almost immediately, peace is once again restored through a warm Allegro in triple time, and it’s this sense of tranquillity which dominates the movement, one of Mozart’s most beautiful. The second movement alternates between stately composure and uneasy storminess and the happy, dance-like Minuet and Trio shrugs off its tightly-wrought structure with Haydn-esque delight. And it’s to Haydn that Mozart looks in the final Allegro, a movement of unalloyed joy during which Mozart explores an eye-popping number of keys. Listen out for the theme at the end, presented over a drone in the bass, Mozart’s homage to the pastoral style of the day when composers often imitated hunting calls and shepherd’s pipes.

Mozart Symphony No. 40 The extraordinary Symphony No. 40 has divided audiences for centuries, Schumann calling it ‘a work of Grecian lightness and grace’ while others have highlighted its tragic nature. And, of course, you’ll make your own mind up. All of which goes to prove the extreme emotional ambiguity and power of this 35-minute masterwork. The second movement is one of the most profoundly beautiful and perhaps spiritual in all of classical music – Mozart’s trump card here is his use of a descending woodwind motif to accompany the main theme in the strings, a trick that somehow tugs inexorably at the heart strings. What’s more, each time that motif reappears,

http://www.colstonhall.org/shows/stephen-johnson-insight-and-english-piano-trio-130116/

bristol international classical season 2015/16

bristol international classical season 2015/16

next concert in the season:

fri 29 jan, 2016, 7.30pm philharmonia orchestraplanet earth in concert

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Catch up with previous notes and videos from

this season

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Mozart uses a different woodwind instrument, whether it be flute, clarinet or bassoon (or a combination). Scattered throughout the movement are delicious, brief moments of tension in the form of harmonic clashes that, ever so briefly, darken the mood. The Menuetto Allegretto is another stroke of genius – a rhythmically joyful movement in a minor key. Is it tragic? Serious? Playful? Mozart seems to be exploring the power of the minor key to manipulate and change our mood. No sooner is this brief movement over, however, than Mozart ambushes us with another emotional rollercoaster, a finale of unstoppable momentum that contains at its heart a moment of baffling brilliance. At the start of what’s called the development, around three or so minutes in, the orchestra plays a passages in unison that takes in ten out of the 12 notes of the western scale. It sounds atonal, entirely modern, and yet Mozart makes it work – it’s a bridge that jolts us into the next section of the movement, with dazzling fugal work that plays with fragments of the main theme.

Mozart Symphony No. 41 ‘Jupiter’ No. 41, the ‘Jupiter’ is the grandest in scale of his three final symphonies, the opening movement, with its trumpets and drums, deserving the nickname alone. At just over 11 minutes, it’s a tour de force of orchestral adventure and daring. Mozart’s epic slow movement is almost as long, full of intensity and what Mozart scholar Neal Zaslaw has called ‘mysterious reverberations of unease’ which you can hear in the opening minutes in the form of disconcerting, accented strings. The Menuetto Allegro is famous to children of the 1980s as the theme of one of the Wombles’ biggest hits. But let’s pass over that. It’s a movement full of great swagger and confidence with an unusually chromatic theme. The enormous last movement is a frenzy of imitation and thematic development, all of which is child’s play in contrast to the coda. In the final few minutes, Mozart tricks the listener into believing the movement is coming to a close before unleashing a stupefying coda in which no fewer than five themes are combined in a dazzling fugue – a miraculous and fitting ending to Mozart’s symphonic output.

Conductor George Fenton Soprano Haley Glennie-Smith

A cosmic collision of spectacular visuals and live orchestral music paint an awe inspiring portrait of our Planet Earth.