Programme Guide

A whole evening of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for your debut? That takes a lot of courage, because particularly with this composer, you hear everything. It says a lot that Mozart’s music is often the key test for orchestral musicians at auditions. The apparent ease of his tonal language is difficult to achieve – and the gracefulness of his melodic lines is almost always underpinned by an underlying drama.

Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev and soprano Sabine Devieilhe, both making their debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker in this concert, are well prepared for this challenge: internationally experienced, at home in Baroque and Classical music performance practice, Mozart’s music forms a focal point for both of them. Maxim Emelyanchev conducts the Italian Early Music Ensemble Il Pomo d’oro and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Sabine Devieilhe’s expressive voice has been praised by the press for its effortless agility.

From the rapid Figaro Overture to the delicate, languorous cavatina “Zeffiretti lusinghieri”, and from Konstanze’s melancholy aria from Entführung to the “Prague” Symphony, whose dramatic opening bars already point to the later Don Giovanni: Mozart is a man of the theatre at every moment in this concert. Opera-like, gestural and emotionally charged, his music explores the many different worlds of emotion – and in the Serenata notturna, composed for the Salzburg carnival celebrations in 1776, we also hear the composer as a purveyor of light entertainment who holds up a mirror to the audience of his time in a way that is as elegant as it is cheeky.