Experience RCO.co.uk's Beautiful Music
Sunday March 8th at 3.00pm
in the Georgian Theatre, Richmond
Prodigies and Whizz-Kids
How the great composers began
An afternoon of music by young musical geniuses aged between 12 and 20.
Mendelssohn at 10, Rossini at 12 and Mozart at 16 gave concerts, wrote literally hundreds of pieces. Gershwin earned $10,000 on Broadway aged 18. We played their astonishing music.
Rossini String Symphony No.2
Britten Simple Symphony
Mozart Divertimento in D major K136
Gershwin Lullaby
Mendelssohn Octet for 4 violins, 2 violas & 2 cellos
Why play the early music of these great composers? So goes the question perhaps: their early work is lightweight, their later works mature and profound. They are also of course more familiar, and we often prefer what we know.
Perhaps the early music illuminates the later; is Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (written at the same time as this Mozart offering) that much better? Would young Rossini’s tunes not sit comfortably in one of his mature operas.? And so on. Britten pokes fun at himself with his childish titles, but the music stands up to it. Most startling is Mendelssohn: he writes with such ferocious and absolute confidence. It’s a stunning piece, and you might well argue that his early music, before he got bogged down in conventional forms, was better. Other composers have written a string octet, Max Bruch, Georges Enescu and Sally Beamish among them. But none of them has the sheer visceral power of Mendelssohn’s gift to his teacher.
So, we can find the unexpected in youthful compositions, and can too easily regard them as trifling. And the audience enjoyed them, that's for sure!