"Musical Hemispheres"
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Dear music-lovers,
A very warm welcome to the 2010 edition of the Johannesburg International Mozart Festival!
2010 – the eagerly awaited year in which South Africa will host the Football World Championship – will see people from all “corners” of the world flock to the southern tip of Africa for this global sports event. Soccer aficionados from all “hemispheres” will enjoy the games, the beauty of South Africa’s landscapes and the hospitality of its people. Following last year’s highly successful premiere of the Johannesburg Mozart Festival as an international event, it is our “goal” to “score” a similar success in 2010 and to reflect on the idea of “hemispheres” and visitors to South Africa in musical terms.
2010 will bring about two new developments for the Johannesburg International Mozart Festival. Running from 23 January to 9 February, we have gone into “extra time” as the number of concerts has literally doubled to 16, compared to the 8 concerts we offered last year. The other significant “substitute” includes a departure from a pure Mozart focus towards a more “forward” concept. While Mozart is and will always remain a motif going through the majority of concert programmes, the Festival will explore Mozart’s genius and ingenuity in a wider sense, creating a setting in which Mozart’s multi-faceted persona will unfold by way of inspiration and discourse.
I am delighted to welcome to the Festival an array of outstanding international and South African artists. Maestro Thomas Sanderling will conduct the Johannesburg Festival Orchestra with a rare performance of Friedrich Helmut Hartmann’s Song of the Four Winds – a spectacular work for big romantic orchestra and two vocal soloists by a composer who left Nazi Austria in the 1930s and emigrated to South Africa where he taught a whole generation of young composers. The German singer Dietrich Henschel, who is making a worldwide career as an opera and lied singer, working with Sir Simon Rattle, Zubin Mehta and Christoph Eschenbach, amongst others, will perform the baritone part. The other vocal soloist is the young South African mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Frandsen. Danish clarinettist Lone Madsen will be the soloist in Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, marking the opening concert of the Festival. Her latest album “White Sands” has recently been released, attracting rave reviews. With musical partners such as Alfred Brendel and Andrea Bocelli we are privileged to hear her in her South African debut. The highly acclaimed young violinist Lidia Baich is no stranger to South African audiences. She also worked with Andrea Bocelli and has given concerts under the baton of Lorin Maazel and Vladimir Fedoseyev. Her appearance in a concert under the theme of “Rock me, Amadeus” will be one of the special surprises of this year’s Festival!
Not only international soloists, but orchestras, too, will grace the stage in Johannesburg. The London-based Imperial College Symphony Orchestra and its Music Director Richard Dickins will perform two concerts at the Linder Auditorium, including Rachmaninov’s epic Symphony No. 2. Other orchestral specials include Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 (“From the New World”) with the sparkling Johannesburg Festival Orchestra under its charismatic Music Director Richard Cock.
I am very pleased to welcome back in 2010 the outstanding Johannesburg-based pianist Malcolm Nay, the eminent piano duo Nina Schumann & Luis Magalhaes, as well as the popular Chanticleer Singers and to announce a return visit of the Melodi Music Ensemble and its director, Nimrod Moloto, marking a long-term collaboration and support scheme under the auspices of the Apollo Music Trust.
And this is just to set the ball rolling…
May I wish you a series of exciting concerts – “home and away”. I look forward very much to seeing you at our events!
Florian Uhlig
Artistic Director
Johannesburg International Mozart Festival