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Mozart at Home 2015
Monday, July 20, 3:00 PM PDT
$12 – $29
Some of Mozart’s most charming and self-revelatory works were written for intimate gatherings with friends and family. Learn about the four fascinating musical families who inspired him: the Mozarts, the Cannabiches, the Webers, and the Jacquins. This concert features the poetic and luminous “Kegelstatt” Trio (K. 498), written for clarinet, viola, and piano, while Mozart was lawn bowling. It includes piano sonatas K. 309 in C Major and K. 310 in A minor; the Sonata for Piano Four Hands K. 19d, written when Mozart was 9 years old; excerpts from Four Hand Sonatas K. 381 and K. 521; and an aria from the early opera Lucio Silla K. 135.
- Keith Lawrence, violin
- Eric Kritz, clarinet
- Susan Waterfall, piano
- Julian Waterfall Pollack, piano
- Carolyn Steinbuck, piano
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