Brandenburg Series presents the Music of Haydn and Mozart

Haydn and Mozart, two of the most towering and iconic figures in music history, were mates.

Despite a significant age difference, they held each other in awe both personally and professionally - and even played some concerts together.

Fast forward 250-odd years, the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra will celebrate this friendship and mutual respect for each other's brilliance with the concert series Haydn, Mozart & Friends.

Taking centre stage will be Jamie Hey, Australia's leading baroque cellist and a much-adored member of the Brandenburg family, and a new friend to the orchestra, star Belgian period horn player, Bart Aerbeydt.

Jamie will play Haydn's dazzling Cello Concerto in C major, now a showpiece for superstar cellists, mostly in performances and recordings featuring huge symphony orchestras and on modern cello with steel strings.

Written in the early 1760s for the famous Esterházy court orchestra, this piece was lost for hundreds of years until the parts were found in Prague in 1961.

Haydn, Mozart & Friends will be a rare opportunity to experience something much closer to what the composer actually heard himself, with gut strings and the original and more intimate Esterházy orchestration.

Jamie has also had a new bow made specifically for Haydn, Mozart & Friends by Japan-based Argentine bow maker Paul Herrera. He will play with a 'transitional' bow, of the type used at the time this work was written.

Bart Aerbeydt, international guest artist in Haydn, Mozart & Friends, lives in Velzeke a small village close to Gent in Belgium.

He will perform Mozart's fourth Horn Concerto, the piece of music that actually led him on his current career path.

"My father was a music lover who had a lot of LPs but never got the chance to learn an instrument himself," says Bart.

"He always regretted the fact that he could not play an instrument so he gave us the chance to play. When the time had come to choose an instrument he took his records and played sound examples of all instruments".

The sound bite that Bart chose, and was to steer his life direction, was a recording of the masterpiece he will play in these concerts: "so you can imagine that this concerto remains special to me."

Bart is now one of the world's finest players and is the principal horn in extremely highly esteemed German early music group Frieberg Baroque Orchestra.

Another work 'lost' for a few hundred years and featured in this concert is Mozart's Harmoniemusik based on music from his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail.

Harmoniemusik was a popular form of dinner entertainment in the 18th century using only woodwind and horn players.

So popular and lucrative was this new craze that Mozart wrote to his dad in 1782 saying he needed to make his own arrangement based on his opera "otherwise someone else will beat me to it and get the profits instead of me".

It wasn't until 1983 that musicologist Bastiaan Blomhert started to look closely at a previously neglected and incorrectly attributed manuscript found it the Black Forest town of Donaueschingen and deduced that this was in fact a copy of the work Mozart had talked about undertaking.

Playing on period oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn, the Brandenburg's virtuosic wind players will bring this long unheard piece to the Australian stage in 2017 in Haydn, Mozart & Friends.

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AUSTRALIAN BRANDENBURG ORCHESTRA
PAUL DYER Artistic Director
JAMIE HEY soloist on period cello
BART AERBEYDT soloist on natural horn

MELBOURNE RECITAL CENTRE
Sat 9 Sept at 7pm
Sun 10 Sept at 5pm

CITY RECITAL HALL, SYDNEY
Wed 13, Fri 15, Wed 20, Fri 22 & Sat 23 Sept at 7pm
MATINEE Sat 23 Sept at 2pm

Joan Sutherland PERFORMING ARTS CENTRE, PENRITH
Sat 16 Sept at 7pm

MUSIC
CANNABICH Sinfonia in E-Flat major
HAYDN Cello Concerto in C major, Hob.VIIb:1
MOZART Harmoniemusik of Die Entführung aus dem Serail
MOZART Concerto for Horn No. 4 in E flat major K495

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