Mozart’s Birthday 2016 at The Estates Theatre

A gala concert on the day of the 260th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart will bring to the Estates Theatre a most welcome – and indeed, permanent – guest of the National Theatre Opera, the internationally renowned Mozartian soprano, Simona Houda Šaturová. The National Theatre orchestra will be conducted by another valued guest, German conductor and former long-time artistic director of the prestigious Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, Rolf Beck. On this occasion, music by Mozart will be coupled with that by another towering figure of the Viennese Classical movement, Joseph Haydn. The two composers were united by bonds of friendship, mutual respect, and also by their membership in the same masonic lodge. In the programme, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) will be presented by a generous chronological cross-section of his output, ranging from the overture to the opera Apollo et Hyacinthus, the work of an eleven-year-old boy (1767), to Symphony in C major KV 425 “Linz” (1784), to the concert aria Vado, ma dove (1789). The operas of Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) have by now virtually fallen into oblivion. Here, they will be recalled by the overture to his Italian opera Armida, denoted as a dramma eroico (1784), and by its title heroine´s virtuoso aria Se pieta de avete, oh Numi.