Youth and springtime are on dazzling display in this Symphony in C concert broadcast, Sunday from 4 to 6 pm on WRTI with music by Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, and Respighi.
Opening the program is Mozart’s D Major Divertimento, K. 136. The 16-year-old composed it in Salzburg during the winter of 1772 as a way to relax after composing his opera Lucia Silla, meeting a deadline for the 1773 carnival season in Milan.
Mozart was certainly a role model for the Tchaikovsky, inspiring his Variations on a Rococo Theme. Tchaikovsky was 36 when he composed it, and it’s the closest he ever came to composing a cello concerto. The soloist is Symphony in C Principal Cellist Yoni Draiblate.
Schubert, particularly in his Fifth Symphony from 1816, also felt Mozart’s influence. It has often been pointed out that this work’s lightness is especially Mozartean.
With spring comes birdsong, and listen to it in Respighi’s Gli uccelli or The Birds. Maestro Stilian Kirov hosts the broadcast, and will discuss the music in between the pieces as well.
PROGRAM:
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Divertimento in D Major, K. 136
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Variations on a Rococo Theme, Op. 33
Yoni Draiblate, cello
Ottorino Respighi: Gli uccelli (The Birds)
Franz Schubert: Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major, D. 485
Stilian Kirov, conductor