Showing @ Ayr Town Hall: 6 April
Showing @ Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh: 7 April
Showing @ City Halls, Glasgow: 8 April
The music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has run like a golden thread through the 2010/11 Scottish Chamber Orchestra season. Audiences have already been treated to his opera Don Giovanni, with the Symphony No 41, better known as the Jupiter, and the Requiem still to come. However, it’s the Austrian prodigy’s piano concertos – he composed 30 of them – that form the core of the SCO’s survey, with two performances coming this week, directed from the keyboard by the eminent American scholar Robert Levin.
Far from a dry experience, Levin’s skills have been described as ‘provocative’ ‘buccaneering’ and ‘daredevil’, so audience members would probably be best advised to buckle up and hold on tight. This time round, Levin will be bringing his huge musical knowledge to bear on the Piano Concertos No 24 in C minor and No 17 in G Major. The first performance of the dark and mysterious No 24 in 1786 marked the last appearance of Mozart as a soloist in his own works, while the more lyrical No 17 was composed for a female pupil and features a theme inspired by – of all things – Mozart’s pet starling.
Bookending the concert is a Haydn symphony, No 97. The SCO will play the first three movements before the piano concertos and the last movement at the end of the evening – an arrangement that is rather novel today but would have barely raised an eyebrow in Haydn’s day.