Mozart

Friday 11.9.2020 19.00 Season concert

29/23/12 € Espoo Cultural Centre

Friday 11.9.2020 19.00 29/23/12 € Espoo Cultural Centre

Artists
Program
Services

The opening concert of the season is a celebration of Mozart arias and symphonies. Tapiola Sinfonietta is conducted by Jonas Rannila and the soloist is internationally acclaimed opera soprano Tuuli Takala, orchestras artist-in-residence 2020/21. . At the afterparty, she shows her chamber music side.

The program is subject to change.
We kindly ask you to check up-to-date information: Special arrangements in Autumn 2020

Artists

Jonas Rannila Conductor

Tuuli Takala Soprano

Program

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Symphony no. 33 in B flat major KV 319

Mozart’s life and output are conventionally divided into three periods: firstly, childhood and adolescence up until 1773, including the ‘Grand Tour’ from Austria to Paris and London (1763–1766) and three important trips to Italy between 1769 and 1773; secondly, maturity and independence up until 1781, during which time Mozart was employed as a musician at the court of Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo in Salzburg, becoming increasingly frustrated, his most significant act of defiance being a trip taken via Mannheim to Paris in 1777–1779. In summer 1781, Mozart finally fell out with his employer and moved to Vienna to become a self-employed artist, beginning his third and last period in which he attained his full mastery.
Mozart’s Symphony no. 33 in B flat major, interestingly, spans the transition between the two latter periods: he wrote it with three movements in summer 1779 and later – after relocating to Vienna – added a Minuet to make the work a standard four-movement Classical symphony.
The Symphony is bright and care-free. Its sonata-form opening movement is at turns elegantly gentle and ceremoniously extrovert. The development section introduces a four-note motif borrowed from Mozart’s earlier Mass in F major (1774) but better known to posterity as the motif opening the finale of his ‘Jupiter’ Symphony (1788). The balanced and idyllic slow movement is followed by a brisk Minuet that betrays its later date by presenting a sharp contrast to the other three movements.
The positive energy in the Symphony rises to a new level in the finale, which is akin to Haydn in its freshness and humour. Propelled by triplet figures shifting between background and foreground, the music ranges from light and breezy to the cordial folkish final theme and the learned but no less elegant counterpoint in the development section.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Arias: ‘Welcher Wechsel ...Traurigkeit ward mir zum Lose’ from Die Entführung aus dem Serail KV 384 ‘Chi sà, chi sà, qual sia’ KV 582 ‘Crudele? ...Non mi dir’ from Don Giovanni KV 527

Opera was probably the genre that Mozart liked the best: something in which he could give profound, humanly compelling and relevant expression to his inexhaustible musical creativity. The characters in his operas are sketched in vivid 3D in the arias he wrote for them; but on occasion he also wrote arias for other composers’ operas.
Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782) was the first opera that Mozart wrote after settling in Vienna as a self-employed artist in 1781. Set in Turkey, it is a salvation opera where a Spanish nobleman named Belmonte rescues his fiancée Konstanze from the seraglio of Pasha Selim. The opera scored a huge success, appealing to audiences with its music and its exoticism. The recitative and aria ‘Welcher Wechsel... Traurigkeit’ is a touching portrayal of Konstanze’s sorrow at being separated from Belmonte.
Mozart wrote the aria ‘Chi sà, chi sà, qual sia’ in 1789 for a performance of the opera Il burbero di buon cuore [The good-hearted miser] by Spanish composer Vicente Martín y Soler (1754–1806), premiered in Vienna in 1786. Martín y Soler was a rival to Mozart as an opera composer, but he relocated to the court of Catherine the Great in St Petersburg in 1788, and when two new arias were needed for a revival of the opera in Vienna, Mozart supplied a feast of vivacious coloratura for the spendthrift Lucilla.
Based on the classic tale of Don Juan, Don Giovanni (1787) is one of the pinnacles of Mozart’s output, often regarded as the most impressive and richest in content among all his operas. Of the three very different female characters in the opera, Donna Anna is the highest-born and consequently the most serious in nature; musically, she inhabits the world of opera seria. Seduced by Don Giovanni, Donna Anna assures Don Ottavio in ‘Crudele! Non mi dir’ that she still loves him but does not want to marry him yet because she is in mourning for her father, who was killed by Don Giovanni.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Symphony no. 36 in C major KV 425 ‘Linz’

Settling in Vienna in summer 1781 represented a new beginning for Mozart both as a composer and as a person. Having found accommodation with a family he knew, the Webers, he fell in love with their daughter Constanze and, in the face of opposition from his father Leopold, married her in August 1782. In order to dispel his father’s prejudice against his young wife, Mozart and Constanze travelled to Salzburg for three months in late summer 1783 to visit Leopold.
On the way back towards the end of October, the Mozarts stopped in Linz for a few days, and here Mozart gave one of many displays of how astonishingly fast he could write music. On 31 October, he wrote in a letter to his father: “I intend to hold a concert at the local theatre here on Tuesday 4 November. Because I have no symphonies with me, I am writing a new one at a terrific pace.” Written perhaps in only four or five days, this work is now known as the ‘Linz’ Symphony KV 425. Despite the breakneck speed at which it was produced, it is a masterpiece in every detail.
The ‘Linz’ Symphony is the first of Mozart’s symphonies which – probably inspired by Haydn – begins with a slow introduction. The fast main section of the opening movement is largely grandiose, but there is a deeper feeling underneath, as witness particularly the externally subdued but tense development section.
Contrary to convention, Mozart included trumpets and timpani in the slow movement, which deftly combines elegance and solemnity. A thematic relationship has been identified between this movement and the slow movement of Haydn’s ‘Maria Theresia’ Symphony, but the anguished minor-key development touching on tragedy in its tone is very much Mozartean.
In the brightly lit Minuet, the ceremonial flanking sections are balanced by the flowing melody of the Trio. The finale has something of the catchy rustic flavour of the opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail, completed by Mozart in the previous year, but it is also shot through with elegance and a subtle shifting between light and shadow. The brief development section is based on a single motif that is passed from one instrument to another, through woodwinds and strings.