W. A. Mozart

This concert will take place: without a live audience in the hall, but with a livestream. The stream will be available here on 29 January at 8pm. 

Will there ever be a time when we are no longer enchanted by the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? Not very likely … The ‘God-given wonder’ (according to his father, Leopold) wrote, in the barely 35 years of his life, an astonishing catalogue of more than 600 compositions – each and every one of them melodic masterpieces.

Browsing through this catalogue to put together a programme devoted to the wunderkind is therefore no punishment, but does present the dilemma of choice... Conductor Kazushi Ono, an old hand in the opera world, has put together a refreshing selection.

La Clemenza di Tito was Mozart’s last opera: an urgent commission that he completed in barely two months, a political statement filled with human emotions that sparkles from the very first note.

Additional emotions come to the fore in Exsultate, jubilate: Mozart was not yet 17 when he wrote this jubilant motet with the features of an aria written for the castrato Venanzio Rauzzini. “The sound of a genius at the peak of his powers”, wrote a reviewer.

That peak would last throughout his life, as the genius worked faster than anyone had ever one: four days were enough, for example, for him to write the beautiful Symphony No. 36.

Flagey, Brussels Philharmonic