![]() ![]() It’s a work that sums up everything he had heard and learnt about symphonic form up to this point in his life (the influence of JC Bach was still crucial for him, whose music he had first heard as a child in London) but which is much more than the sum of those influences, and is something that only Mozart could have written. It’s music that crystallises the young man’s emerging compositional self-confidence, and that shows him spreading his wings in symphonic music just as he had already started to do in the opera house and in his chamber music. This symphony might have changed my own musical history, but I'm not going to argue that it changed musical history from the moment it was first written, in Salzburg in early 1774 by the 18-year-old Mozart. Not that I thought any of that consciously when I heard it played by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Richard Hickox, in the early 1980s but this music symbolises, for me, the potential power of the musical experience and the start of a never-ending journey of discovery. This was the first piece of music that I ever heard in an orchestral concert, and it was an experience that had the immediacy of an epiphany, a revelation of a new world of feeling and being. ![]() ![]() There are many specifically musical reasons why this apparently unselfconscious piece ought to be part of this series on its own terms, but my reason for including Mozart’s A Major Symphony, K201 in the series is a simple one. ![]()
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