Virtual Summer
Symphony Season – Concert 1

Celebrating our long-awaited reunion with our audience, the KZN Philharmonic’s opening programme of our virtual Spring Season is aptly devoted to two works penned by two of the world’s best loved composers, Mozart and Beethoven.

A relatively early work in his oeuvre, Mozart’s G Major Flute Concerto is a showpiece of unfettered joy and beauty. Richly imbued with delectable melody and elegance, is offers virtuoso performance opportunities for the solo player which are integrated into the orchestral fabric of the accompanying strings, oboes, and horns.

Cast in the traditional three movements of the period, its unassuming grace is undershot with imaginative workmanship and expressive power, testifying to a creative genius of Mozart’s sublime stature.

The evening’s programme concludes with a performance Beethoven’s universally adored “Pastorale” Symphony. Offered here as a 250th anniversary salute to its creator’s birth in 1770, the work was first performed in the Theater an der Wien on 22 December 1808 during a marathon concert which lasted all of four hours. To this day the symphony enjoys something of a unique reputation. It stands as a symphonic forerunner of the genre of ‘programme music’ which became popular in the Romantic era of Mendelssohn, Schubert and their contemporaries.

Indeed, Beethoven’s “Pastorale” is one of his few works containing explicitly programmatic content, each of its five movements conjuring a specific mood or scene which evokes joyous or dramatic aspects of life in the Viennese countryside.

Tickets for the series of four concerts are R600.
Individual concerts are R200 each.