Haydn–Mozart

A musical caricature, a playful concerto, a solemn opera overture, and a surprisingly somber symphony – Gábor Takács-Nagy, who was awarded the Kossuth Prize in 2024, will return to the Festival Orchestra with a range of colors of Mozart and Haydn. A specialist of the composers, he believes in taking creative risks, so his performances are always fresh and original. The first half of the concert will be centered around mirth and mockery – and, of course, Alexander Sitkovetsky’s playful performance. As a child, the excellent violinist studied with Menuhin; he is now the artistic director of NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra, Wrocław. Following the BFO’s concert for peace in August 2024, Hungarian audiences can once again enjoy him performing on his Stradivari made in 1679. After the interval, the concert will continue with a Mozart overture and then one of Haydn’s London Symphonies, probably composed in tribute to his late colleague.

Everyone is familiar with Mozart’s Little Night Music, but perhaps fewer know that he also composed another divertimento at the time, which became a satirical counterpart to the elegant piece. A Musical Joke, written in 1784, pokes fun at the clumsy, inept composers and performers with whom Mozart was supposedly in competition. In order to understand the jokes, of course, we should know these contemporaries that Mozart referred to, but most importantly, also the musical rules of the age. Apart from the clichés, parallel fifths, wrong proportions of orchestral parts and inappropriate key changes, the most blatant joke is the work’s unbearably dissonant final bar.

When Haydn entered the service of Prince Miklós Esterházy on May 1, 1761, he soon realized that there was another musical hopeful at the court: the barely twenty-year-old Luigi Tomasini. Perhaps he was motivated by a desire to maintain a good rapport with the Prince and the concertmaster when he composed four violin concertos for his young colleague. The first movement of the Concerto in A major consists of essentially a single theme, but varied by the composer until it becomes a contrasting second subject. The slow movement is a gentle aria worthy of a serenade, and the energetic virtuoso finale is also characterized by lyricism.

After Salieri had turned down the offer, Mozart was eventually commissioned to compose an opera to celebrate the coronation of Emperor Leopold II as King of Bohemia. The composer put aside the Magic Flute to write La clemenza di Tito in just 18 days, which he managed to complete for the premiere on September 6, 1791, although he had to finish it hastily on his way to Prague. The Empress described the work as “German swinishness” despite the fanfare at the beginning of the overture, which was clearly intended as a tribute to the coronation. Nevertheless, the music of the opera is fresh, lively, exciting, elegant and dynamic.

Mozart died three months after composing La clemenza di Tito, and Haydn received the news during his first trip to London. “I was for some time quite beside myself over his death. I cannot believe that Providence should so quickly have called an irreplaceable man into the next world,” he wrote to his friend. It was certainly this grief that defined the mood of the last of the six symphonies written for the London concert series. The opening movement begins with an ominous slow introduction, where Haydn hid the main theme. The hymn-like slow movement has unusual depth, and not even the minuet is as light as in his other symphonies. Haydn the humorist appears only in the finale where he composed an unexpected keyboard solo at the end of the piece.