The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra opens the month of April with its second annual VSO Spring Festival featuring five exciting concerts focused on the life and compositions of the one and only Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
The 2015 Spring Festival opens with the acclaimed movie Amadeus. Winner of 8 Academy Awards® (including Best Picture), Milos Forman’s film Amadeus chronicles the imagined story of Mozart and Salieri. Note: Amadeus will be played in its original form and does not include orchestral accompaniment.
The second concert also focuses on the infamous rivalry between Mozart and his contemporary, Salieri, in a very different way than the movie Amadeus. Rimsky-Korsakov’s one-act, two-scene opera Mozart & Salieri follows the (almost certainly untrue) legend that Salieri poisoned Mozart (also the subject of the film Amadeus), with glorious music that quotes Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Requiem throughout the score. This is followed by the first of Mozart’s illustrious three final symphonies, written in an extraordinary three-month burst of creativity in 1788.
The third concert takes its inspiration from one of Mozart’s most famous works: his opera Don Giovanni. The legendary lover Don Juan (Don Giovanni) has been the subject of many musical portrayals, but none so powerful as Mozart’s opera, and the epic tone poem Don Juan by the late Romantic-era composer Richard Strauss; a composer who worshipped Mozart as a compositional god, and whose music was greatly influenced by him as well. Mozart’s great G minor Symphony brings this concert to an emotional close.
The fourth concert of this year’s Spring Festival centers around Mozart’s magical Symphony No. 41—his “Jupiter” Symphony. This was his last and greatest symphony which is a thrilling, uplifting statement of sheer joy and musical perfection. To juxtapose Mozart’s ultimate symphony, this concert will also feature Mozart’s First Symphony which he penned at the tender age of 8 years old.
Closing out our 2015 Spring Festival is a performance of arguably the most recognizable and adored work in Mozart’s entire catalogue, the last work he ever wrote, and certainly one of the greatest choral works ever written: his magnificent and timeless Requiem. Left uncompleted at the time of his death, this Requiem with its mysterious commissioner ultimately became a requiem for Mozart himself, and brings the Spring Festival journey to a fitting and emotional conclusion. The VSO welcomes four star soloists and the UBC Opera Ensemble to the Orpheum Theatre stage to bring this incredible work to life. Maestro Bramwell Tovey conducts and hosts the entirety of the Spring Festival.
As a fun and exciting way to introduce children to the music of Mozart, Maestro Bramwell Tovey will lead the next presentation of our Kids’ Koncerts entitled Inspector Tovey Meets Mozart. The intrepid and always-popular Inspector Tovey explores The Mozart Effect through a time-traveling meeting with the greatest composer who ever lived, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart!
