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VIRTUOSI OF LA SCALA,
MILAN
Conductor:
Carlo Piazza
Invitation to Mozart’s
home
TORRECHIARA FESTIVAL
2008
Torrechiara Festival is honoured to host I Virtuosi
della Scala, a chamber group entirely comprising musicians from
the celebrated Milanese theatre who have joined together with the
intention of sharing their artistic experience, matured over years
of collaboration with the most renowned conductors and soloists of
the international music scene. To guarantee the highest quality of
artistry at concerts the group is composed mainly of soloists from
the Scala’s orchestra. The group’s repertory is characterised by great
versatility and ranges from the great baroque composers to Mozart’s
chamber works – the serenades, divertimenti and symphonies of his
youth; from the 18th century concerto for soloist and orchestra to
the transcriptions of Italian opera music in vogue during the 19th
century; arriving at contemporary music for small chamber ensembles.
Conducted by Maestro Carlo Piazza
these exceptional interpreters will guide us along the path forged
by the genius of Salzburg as composer in an appealing Invitation
to Mozart’s home.
In spite of the fact that most of the works on
the programme were written in his childhood and adolescence, the quality,
maturity, perfection and equilibrium never reveal the youthful age
of the composer.
In Cassazione (Final-Musik) kv. 63 and in
Divertimento kv. 113 Mozart, still a boy, masterfully infuses
the music with freshness and invention, managing to reinvigorate the
well established formulae of the various genres with an extremely
pleasing outcome.
The 29th Symphony kv. 201 then represents
proof of his exceptional maturity and well-roundedness both from a
technical-instrumental standpoint as well as artistically. According
to the musicologist Alfred Einstein, this symphony, composed in 1774
at the age of 18, contains the richest and most dramatic development
that Mozart had written to date and it remains justifiably among his
most remarkable and beloved works.
Mozart’s artistic stature is perceptible everywhere
in his continuous search of the new, the surprising, in all the things
he doesn’t discount, qualities already refined at an extremely early
age during the numerous voyages to Italy and throughout Europe, thanks
to his lively curiosity and to his uncommon capacity for assimilating
everything new and original which was going on in the music scene
of the time.
Knowledge and passionate study of his predecessors,
above all J.S. Bach, was no less important in the development of Mozart’s
artistic personality. In a single mature masterpiece such as the
Adagio and Fugue kv 546 Mozart tackles one of the highest compositional
forms of the past, bearing in mind the lesson of the great Master
but, once again, transforming it and making it his own by means of
an unusual finale and the use of dissonance and daring harmonics which
imbue the classical purity of the form with a powerful drama.
His untimely death interrupted Mozart’s mind-blowing creative curve.
Leaving us to be tempted by a hint of romanticism and perhaps, paradoxically,
we can say that the power of his genius overwhelmingly overcame the
fragility of the man, enabling him to achieve so much in just 35 years.
Nevertheless we must be grateful to fate or serendipity for the gift
of such an artist and his music, without whom we would be orphans
and ignorant of such extraordinary beauty.
Translation by Sarah J Hyde -
www.thelanguage.biz
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