Buffalo Orchestra Presents Mozart To Bruckner

Then, to round off the Austrian connection, the BPO will render Anton Bruckner's orchestral farewell, his towering Symphony No. 9, rich with urgent tenderness, dream-like harmonies and the celestial power of a cathedral organ (on which Bruckner was a virtuoso performer).

The concert will be presented at Kleinhans Music Hall on Saturday, January 26 at 8:00PM, and Sunday, January 27 at 2:30PM.

When the name is Mozart, something extraordinary is always at hand. Of course we are not surprised that Wolfgang Amadeus composed five concertos for the violin - 'prolific' is the term which fairly comes to mind. But here we have a phenomenon without parallel in music: evidence is strong that all five were composed in 1775 when the composer was 19 years old. The only exception to this chronology is that some archival records suggest the current work could have been written two years earlier, which only adds to our amazement, i.e. the wunderkind would have been just 17 years old.

Anton Bruckner received his formal training in the classical traditions; and, like most composers of his era, he became a fine master of the keyboard, excelling especially at the organ console. He was also a professor of composition at the University of Vienna during which time he was much admired by his students for his wit and musical insight. But personally there were a few awkward counter-points to his nature. For example, as a man steeped in the Romantic Age, he could never get it quite right with romance, having made several awkward proposals of marriage to women who were either far too young for him or otherwise inaccessible.

He was also devoutly religious with a mystic intuition verging on superstition. Likewise his musical disposition was ambivalent, with a lifelong passion for the fantasy of Wagner's operas, near reverence for the symphonic rigor of Beethoven and admiration for the music of Berlioz and Liszt. -- www.bpo.org