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Mozart at Court and Outdoors 2015
Tuesday, July 21, 3:00 PM PDT
$12 – $29
Featuring the Festival Chamber Players
Many of Mozart’s chamber works were composed for aristocratic salons or outdoor entertainment. The Festival Chamber Players will perform two of Mozart’s most serious and introspective masterpieces for these settings. Wind octets usually were light outdoor music for royal parties, but in K. 388 Mozart used the instrumental combination to explore the pathos and drama of the key of C minor. The G minor Viola Quintet (K. 516) was written at the time of Mozart’s father’s final illness. Mozart’s peaking creative powers enabled him to unify this emotionally turbulent four movement work, just as his own world was falling apart.
Mozart in Mendocino, a Four-Part Series
This Susan Waterfall production is a four-day exploration of the lesser-known aspects of Mozart’s life and music, with examinations of his social and cultural context, both silly and serious. Why was Punch the drink of the Enlightenment? How did Mozart’s bawdy brand of family humor serve to balance his deeply introspective bouts of composing? A coda to the Mozart festivities will be Spencer Myer’s performance of Piano Concerto No. 21 K. 467 with the Festival Orchestra. People came away from last year’s Bachfest saying, “I thought I knew all about Bach, but I learned so many fascinating details.” Now on to Mozart!
Susan Waterfall’s production of the Mozart in Mendocino series is generously sponsored by Thomas Safran.
“Waterfall’s productions—which in the past have included such diverse themes as Scandalous Music! Satie, Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky; Bartok’s Women; and Degenerate Music, the modern music of Germany (and the German émigré community) during the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era and World War II—always present exciting, absorbing playing of great music, but are also rare, distinctive examples of what can be called music education, though they’re more conversational, truly a sharing of perspective, interest, anecdote … Her manner is like a friend’s turning at a dinner table to answer a question with expert information and wit. There’s a sense of immediacy to her delivery, weaving in and out of the playing, that knits together different perspectives from the past two and a half centuries into an intimately conceived prescience, a present awareness of this heritage. It’s something unique that needs to be experienced.” Ken Bullock, Berkeley Daily Planet