Soloists:
Alexei Lukirsky (violin)
Yelizaveta Berezhnova (viola)
Conductor: Dmitry Ralko
PROGRAMME:
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra in E-Flat Major, KV 364
Symphony No 29 in A Major, KV 201
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was drawn to serve in Salzburg, and visits to his home town were always more than fruitful. In 1779 in Salzburg he composed his Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra. The idea for it came from analogous works for several solo instruments composed in abundance by composers from Mannheim (the famous orchestra there was known as the “army of generals”, as the solos could basically be performed by any musician). The first bars of Mozart’s score coincide with the beginning of one of the symphonies by Johann Stamitz from Mannheim.
At that time, the viola was the “Cinderella”, though Mozart loved to play this instrument and gifted violists this virtuoso and, at the same time, deep work. In order for the viola to sound more resonant, Mozart proposed reorganising the strings in his Sinfonia Concertante. Going against tradition, the orchestra features not one viola section but two.
There is total equality between the solo violin and the solo viola. As there are two soloists, it was impossible to improvise the cadenzas, as was standard practice at the time. The Sinfonia Concertante is one of few works by Mozart in which all the cadenzas were written by the composer himself.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart completed his Symphony No 29 in A Major (K. 201)in Salzburg on 6 April 1774. Later an unknown hand removed the date in the manuscript, and music historians had to call in criminologists in order to read the vanished writing using colour filters.
The symphony was composed at a time when the distinction between orchestral and chamber music was not yet inviolable. The first two movements are delicate, indeed almost intimate. The secondary theme of the second movement is literally woven from incredibly light sighs, while in the short development one can hear the “cooing” of the violins. The last two movements, on the other hand, are energetic. The menuetto is adorned with calls of the oboes and the French horns (other than these there are no wind instruments in the orchestra), and each section of the finale concludes with a soaring passage of the violins crowned by a heroic coda. Three movements of the symphony (all apart from the menuetto) are written in dynamic sonata form. Each of them concludes with a coda in which the main theme of each returns, as if the eighteen-year-old composer were summing up what he had achieved with a confident hand each time.
Anna Bulycheva
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