David Robertson And Pianist Emanuel Ax Open The SSO's 2018 Season With A Mozart Celebration

One of the world's greatest concert pianists Emanuel Ax will join the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Chief Conductor and Artistic Director David Robertson to perform six of the Mozart piano concertos at the Sydney Opera House on 1-10 February.

A Mozart Celebration - spanning three concert programs - will be a chance for audiences to see these two great musical forces and long-time friends reunite in Sydney for the first time since 2014, when Robertson and Ax performed the complete cycle of Beethoven piano concertos with the SSO to five-star reviews.

Robertson says the success of that collaboration sparked their idea to explore the genius of Mozart across two weeks: "Emanuel Ax brings that spirit of collaboration that makes him a lot of fun to perform with and adds an overall joy to the experience. There's this constant going back and forth between not only Emanuel and me, but with all the members of the orchestra - whether that's the violin section or a single player in the woodwinds.

"There's no way we could do the complete series of Mozart concertos in a couple of weeks. But what Emanuel has managed to do is choose six piano concertos that show the composer's incredible range, whether that's in terms of the emotional qualities - the joys, the sadness, the drama - or the means he uses to achieve them," Robertson says. "Audiences will have not only a very enjoyable experience, but come away with a much richer and deeper understanding of how extraordinary Mozart's achievement was."

Tickets available from the SSO Box Office on (02) 8215 4600 or choose your own seat at sydneysymphony.com.