2nd Anniversary Concert (Woodwind Serenades)

Two special concerts celebrating the anniversary of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester celebrate the Munich “household gods” Richard Strauss and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In the first of the two concerts, instrumental late works and an early song cycle by Strauss are on the programme; in the second, the orchestra’s woodwind section presents two wind serenades, in addition to Mozart’s work in C minor, Antonín Dvořák’s Serenade in D minor.

The second anniversary concert (in Munich’s Prinzregentenheater) will feature the woodwind section of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester performing two of the serenade genre’s pinnacle works. In 1782, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had just begun to build up an existence as a freelance composer and musician in Vienna, after the personnel manager of his Salzburg employer had kicked him out of his employment. The commission to provide a work for the “imperial harmony” (brass band) just founded by Joseph II came welcome but at short notice (“I quickly had to make a night of musique, but only on harmonie”), and as so often, Mozart’s contribution far outstripped the usual: with the nocturnally sombre Serenade in C minor, he basically created a veritable symphony for winds. Antonín Dvořák had this model in mind when he, in turn, wrote a serenade in a minor key for woodwind instruments almost a hundred years later – two works that exhaust the wealth of expressive possibilities of oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon, in the case of the Bohemian composer further enriched by violoncello and double bass.

Photo credit: Nikolaj Lund