R4 / Mozart squared • Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy and, as an adult, a musician employed by the Archbishop of Salzburg, his hometown. It was only in the last ten years of his life that he broke free of these ties and spent them as a free musician in search of an audience, social recognition and a living. Although he struggled financially, artistically it was the height of his work, when he was successful both as a writer, especially in opera, and as a performer. Together with Haydn and Beethoven, he became the most typical representative of Viennese Classicism, but his individual creative approach to stimuli and compositional norms transcended his time in many ways. In the first half of the 1880s, while still in Vienna, he wrote the Great Mass in C minor, which he premiered in Salzburg during a visit to introduce his father to his newlywed wife. Later, in 1788, within weeks of each other, he wrote two completely different master symphonies – the 40th in the somewhat darker key of G minor and the 41st in the exuberant key of C major. Conductor Václav Luks is a leading Czech specialist in historically informed performance of period music, founder and artistic director of the Collegium 1704 period instrument orchestra. The pairing of the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra with the vocal part of his ensemble promises an extraordinary intersection of the use of modern instruments with the exciting aesthetics of reviving an earlier sound and musical expression in both Mozart works.