Works of the early Classical period with Reinhard Goebel

Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven – the triumvirate of the First Viennese School! That’s what you learn in music class, and that’s what you read in repertoire guides and concert programmes. And yet, as every music lover suspects, music history cannot have proceeded in quite so straightforward a way. Reinhard Goebel, founder and director of the now legendary ensemble Musica Antiqua Köln for more than 30 years and one of the most renowned and greatest musicians in the field of historically informed performance practice, has put together a programme for his conducting debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker that highlights the music Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart grew up with.

Christian Cannabich, one year older than Haydn and one of the important representatives of the Mannheim school, which also strongly influenced Mozart’s music, is represented in this programme with one of his circa 90 symphonies. Also part of the programme: Johann Sebastian Bach’s youngest son, born in 1735. After his father died, Johann Christian Bach was first taught by his older brother Carl Philipp Emanuel, who had a position at the court of Frederick the Great in Potsdam, and later worked in Milan and London. He was a true cosmopolitan – and a composer Mozart greatly admired.

This concert includes instrumental pieces from his opera Amadis de Gaule, premiered in Paris in 1779. One cannot fail to hear the marks the music of Cannabich and Johann Christian Bach left on Mozart’s oeuvre in his Notturno K. 286, written by the young Salzburg composer at the end of the 1770’s.

Berliner Philharmoniker

Reinhard Goebel