Australian Brandenburg Orchestra: Haydn, Mozart & Friends
The Australian Brandenburg Orchestra under Artistic Director Paul Dyer AO, presents Haydn, Mozart & Friends which features the rare sound of the period horn played by Belgian expert Bart Aerbeydt and the talents of the orchestra’s own leading baroque cellist, Jamie Hey.
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.
Jamie will play Haydn’s dazzling Cello Concerto in C major in the context of smaller orchestral forces and using a new bow which he had made, specifically for this concert by Japan-based Argentine bow maker Paul Herrera. The bow is of a ‘transitional’ type used at the time this work was written in the early 1760s. Written for the 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 Haydn himself created with gut stringed instruments and the original and more intimate Esterházy orchestration.
Bart Aerbeydt, guest artist in Haydn, Mozart & Friends, lives near Gent in Belgium. He is a members of the Frieberg Baroque Orchestra.He will perform Mozart’s fourth Horn Concerto, the piece of music that led him on his current career path. Says Bart “My father was a music lover who had a lot of LPs but never got the chance to learn an instrument himself. 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, ” he explains.
Bart is now one of the world’s finest players and is the principal horn in the esteemed German early music group the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra.
This programme is being performed in Sydney and in Penrith and features another work which was lost for a few hundred years, 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 father Leopold 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 in 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.
The programme: 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
The performers: The Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, PAUL DYER Artistic Director/ JAMIE HEY soloist on period cello/ BART AERBEYDT soloist on natural horn
