Elisabeth Leonskaja plays Mozart

"Without traveling (at least for people of the arts and sciences), one is surely a pitiful creature!" Mozart wrote from Paris in 1778. Things didn't work out in Paris. Four years later, he had moved to Vienna, was newly married, and composed three piano concertos to earn money as a pianist and concert organizer. The first of these concertos, the one in A major, K. 414, already has everything that Mozart's later concertos have; it's actually a miracle.

Elisabeth Leonskaja is the perfect interpreter for the delicate beauty of this work and the necessary balance between rhythm and flow. She shares not only artistic interests with Mozart, but also biographical ones: in 1978, she too remained in Vienna to escape the constraints of her Soviet origins. Tchaikovsky also traveled extensively, for example to Florence in 1890, where he composed the opera "The Queen of Spades." Back in Russia, he wrote a six-part work that was as artful as it was highly emotional: "Souvenir de Florence."

Among the "people of superior talent" who, according to Mozart, must travel in order not to "become bad" is Bogdan Božović, concertmaster of Musikkollegium . His life journey from Belgrade via Salzburg and Vienna has taken him not only to Winterthur, but also to Esbjerg in Denmark, from where he now brings Danish folk sounds.

Program:
Trad./Danish String Quartet - "Last Leaf" Suite for String Orchestra
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 12 in A major, K. 414

PAUSE

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - "Souvenir de Florence" Op. 70 for string orchestra

Red Sofa following the concert at the Park Hotel (Comensoli Hall). Sebastian Hazod in conversation with Bogdan Božović and Elisabeth Leonskaja.