Mozart & Strauss: Les Dissonances

Lo spettacolo

The month of May comes to Dijon this year under the sign of Mozart. There is no anniversary in particular – it is for the pure pleasure of the spirit and the senses that a series of concerts is being devoted to him, because – above and beyond the necessary celebrations –  this music is quite simply our daily bread.

The month will begin with two major works. The first is a masterpiece of strength and joyous vitality, composed in the city that most honoured Mozart during his lifetime, Prague. Is the solemn majesty of the introduction paying homage to the extraordinary city that had just made a triumph of Le Nozze di Figaro? And yet it is Die Zauberflote that the Symphony No. 38 most closely resembles, where all tension is resolved in a surfeit of light and movement. Mozart’s ultimate and most diaphanous concerto, his Clarinet concerto, brings us into the mysterious ethos that hovered over the composer’s final year: serene, autumnal light, absolute inspirational freedom in a form created without any constraints, spiritual decantation that touches the highest tonalities of the soul – all are qualities that are inseparable from the project undertaken by Les Dissonances.

And Richard Strauss? Before becoming the most famous creator of symphonic poems of his time, the composer from Munich tended towards the classical, and Mozart in particular, as can be heard in this Romance from 1883, a universe towards which the modernist would constantly return throughout his life.

Cello, Fran­çois Salque
Clarinet, Vincent Al­be­rola