
If someone ever asked you:
“Music, what is it?” “Mozart, you would say, It’s music itself.”
(Luis Cernuda)
In this concert we will delve into the most unusual Mozart for the general public through the dialogue between harp, flute, string and wind. It’s a peculiar tribute to the composer through some commissioned pieces that marked a before and after in the development and composition of instruments little known at the time, such as the harp.
The concert begins with three little waltzes by Mozart transcribed in 1940 for harp and strings by the Italian composer and conductor Gian Luca Tocchi, most of whose compositions are being recovered after having been lost for decades.
The Adagio and Rondo is the penultimate in a series of five pieces created for unusual instruments. It is a work written by Mozart specifically for the blind performer Marianne Kirchgessner. Composed then for glass harmonica, it’s replaced by the harp. We close the program with the Concerto for flute, harp and orchestra, commissioned by the Duke of Guînes and his eldest daughter, flutist and harpist respectively.
Mozart composed this concerto to suit his requestors, who, however, never paid the composer for the work done. In any case, it is a work that marked a milestone in the future of the harp as a solo instrument and in duet with the flute -a combination considered unusual up to that time-. The original manuscript of the concerto still exists and has been kept since 1948 at the Jacobian University in Krakow.