Amadeus series • ERSO kontserdisarjad 2023/2024

ERSO’s new concert series Amadeus will begin with the opening concert of ERSO’s 97th season. With this brand new concert series, we will be paying homage to the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The evening will be opened by Tõnu Kõrvits’ new work for brass orchestra and percussion instruments. Mozart’s last and most complex symphony, Symphony No. 41, also known as Jupiter, will be performed at this concert. The soloist will be the young and outstanding Estonian violinist Hans Christian Aavik, who also worked with ERSO last season. At the Christmas concert, he performed Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 2, and this time, he will be performing an excerpt from another Viennese classic – Ludwig van Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, the first monumental work in its genre and the forerunner for later Romantic violin concertos.

For the second year in a row, we await the public to join us in opening Christmas celebrations with an ERSO concert. This year’s Christmas concert will once again be inspired by the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with a focus on vocal music. ERSO will be joined by two bright young singers: soprano Mirjam Mesak, who is pursuing a career as a soloist with the Bavarian State Opera, and mezzo-soprano Sandra Laagus, who is at the beginning of her career as a singer, but has already distinguished herself as a mature artist. The concert will feature excerpts from Mozart’s operas, as well as two of his symphonies – No. 31 and No. 32. In keeping with the festive season, we will also hear Suite de Noels by French composer François-Joseph Gossec. The programme also includes the work of Louise Farrenc, the first and only woman in the nineteenth century to become a professor at the Paris Conservatory.

Acclaimed chamber musician, soloist, and concertmaster Florian Donderer will be performing with ERSO at the third concert of the series. He is well known to local audiences as the concertmaster of the Estonian Festival Orchestra and first violin of the outstanding Signum Quartet. For the ERSO concert, Florian Donderer has selected Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 for the programme. All of Mozart’s violin concertos were written over a short period of time in Salzburg, with the fifth, the Concerto in A major, a youthfully fresh and sincere work, being the last of them. Alongside Mozart, Donderer has selected works by Fanny Mendelssohn and Franz Schubert. Fanny was a talented pianist and composer who was overshadowed as a musician by her brother, Felix Mendelssohn. From Schubert, we will hear Symphony No. 4, subtitled Tragic, which is the most serious of his first six symphonies, reminiscent of the musical compositions of the of the Sturm und Drang period.

In 2021, Misora Ozaki was awarded the fourth prize and the ERSO Special Prize at the 2021 Tallinn International Piano Competition. This season, we are welcoming the young pianist back to Tallinn, and our own young conductor, Henri Christofer Aavik, will conduct the performance of one of the most popular Romantic piano concertos, Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor. Aavik has recently attracted attention in Europe by winning the first prize in the Jorma Panula Conducting Competition and the second prize in the Yevgeny Svetlanov International Conducting Competition. In fact, the young conductor has called Neeme Järvi, long-time Chief Conductor of ERSO, one of the most important role models in his conducting career. ERSO will also be performing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Symphony No. 36 and the overture The Hebrides by another musical child prodigy, Felix Mendelssohn.

I: SEASON OPENER

Friday, 15 September 2023

at 6 p.m. (pre-concert)

at 7 p.m.

Tõnu Kõrvits. Tuultele (premiere)

Ludwig van Beethoven. Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551

HANS CHRISTIAN AAVIK on violin, ERSO, conductor OLARI ELTS

II: CHRISTMAS CONCERT BY ERSO

Friday, 22 December 2023

at 7 p.m.

François-Joseph Gossec. Suite de Noels (Christmas Suite)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. ‘Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben’ from the opera Zaide, K. 344

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Symphony No. 32 in G major, K. 318

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. ‘Exsultate, jubilate’, K. 165

Louise Farrenc. Overture No. 2, Op. 24

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. ‘L’amerò, sarò costante’, K. 208, from the opera Il re pastore, KV 208

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Symphony No. 31, ‘Paris’, in D major, K. 297/300a

Soprano MIRJAM MESAK, mezzo-soprano SANDRA LAAGUS, ERSO, conductor OLARI ELTS

III: DONDERER AND SCHUBERT

Friday, 9 February 2024

at 7 p.m.

Fanny Mendelssohn. Overture in C major

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Violin Concerto No. 5 A major, K. 219

Franz Schubert. Symphony No. 4 in C major, D 417

FLORIAN DONDERER on violin, ERSO

IV: HENRI CHRISTOFER AAVIK AND MOZART

Friday, 12 April 2024

at 7 p.m.

Felix Mendelssohn. Overture Hebrides, Op. 26

Robert Schumann. Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Symphony No. 36 in C major, K. 425

MISORA OZAKI on piano, ERSO, conductor HENRI CHRISTOFER AAVIK