Post by erik on Aug 6, 2022 12:20:58 GMT -5
The very first symphony of one Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, composed when he was all of eight years old, is in this week's Classical Works Spotlight.
Mozart: SYMPHONY NO. 1 IN E FLAT MAJOR, K. 16
In the history of music, there has never been a composer who could be called a “wunderkind” more than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In his short life, which ended with sudden sharpness less than two months short of his 36th birthday, the Salzburg-born composer, along with the much older Franz Joseph Haydn, would usher in the Classical era of music. Nowhere is this more apparent than in how early Mozart got onto the symphonic bandwagon. Mozart’s very first symphony, in E Flat Major, is a remarkable effort, given that he wrote it in 1764, when he was only eight years old. Already, he was proving himself to be exceptionally adapt at the piano, which would soon unleash no fewer than twenty-seven piano concertos (though the first four of these were actually piano works by other composers that Mozart adapted for piano and small orchestra); and here, although it may have been his maiden effort in the symphonic form and in only three movements, it shows how much he had learned from his predecessors, including Johann Christian Bach, and his own father Leopold. The three-movement form that Mozart conceived here is an extension of the Italian opera overture form, which was usually in three parts (Fast; Slow; Fast); and with an orchestra of just two oboes, two French horns, and strings, the Mozart First Symphony gives us an idea of where he would go with the other forty symphonies he would compose over the next thirty years.
English Chamber Orchestra/SIR JEFFREY TATE (EMI)
Included:
Mozart: SYMPHONIES NOS. 2-41
Mozart: SYMPHONY NO. 1 IN E FLAT MAJOR, K. 16
In the history of music, there has never been a composer who could be called a “wunderkind” more than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In his short life, which ended with sudden sharpness less than two months short of his 36th birthday, the Salzburg-born composer, along with the much older Franz Joseph Haydn, would usher in the Classical era of music. Nowhere is this more apparent than in how early Mozart got onto the symphonic bandwagon. Mozart’s very first symphony, in E Flat Major, is a remarkable effort, given that he wrote it in 1764, when he was only eight years old. Already, he was proving himself to be exceptionally adapt at the piano, which would soon unleash no fewer than twenty-seven piano concertos (though the first four of these were actually piano works by other composers that Mozart adapted for piano and small orchestra); and here, although it may have been his maiden effort in the symphonic form and in only three movements, it shows how much he had learned from his predecessors, including Johann Christian Bach, and his own father Leopold. The three-movement form that Mozart conceived here is an extension of the Italian opera overture form, which was usually in three parts (Fast; Slow; Fast); and with an orchestra of just two oboes, two French horns, and strings, the Mozart First Symphony gives us an idea of where he would go with the other forty symphonies he would compose over the next thirty years.
English Chamber Orchestra/SIR JEFFREY TATE (EMI)
Included:
Mozart: SYMPHONIES NOS. 2-41