Southern Pro Musica celebrates The Genius of Mozart

As Jonathan says, it “features a programme that travels from a work by his moderately-talented but hugely ambitious and pushy father Leopold Mozart, through an early symphony that Mozart wrote when a child progidy to two of his finest late works – the Clarinet Concerto and his final Symphony No 41 (Jupiter).”

The concert is in St Paul's Church, Chichester on Saturday, May 11, with tickets on www.southernpromusica.org

“The theme of the concert is where did Mozart come from so we get this work by his father and then an early work which then flows into these two absolute masterpieces. Mozart's fluency and instinct as a composer were extraordinary. His talent just flowed out of him and that was apparent from a very early age as a composer. By the age of ten he had a really quite sophisticated portfolio of works. It really was remarkable.

“The whole essence of the concert is to take the life and development of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart starting with a short symphony by his father who was the epitome of the moderately talented composer. His music would not be known at all if he had not had Wolfgang Amadeus as his son but really the idea is to show the starting point. And then we see the early symphony which Mozart wrote when he was about seven. It's an extraordinary piece but you can still see in it the influences of the music that he was growing up with. And then we move on to the two masterpieces.

“We have a brilliant young clarinettist as our soloist in the concerto Jonathan Leibovitz who is a multi-international award-winning musician who has performed to great acclaim all over Europe and further afield.”

Jonathan added: “Southern Pro Musica is a professional chamber orchestra which I have now been musical director of for more than 30 years. Really it exists for three purposes. The origin was that we needed a really good professional orchestra to partner choirs in performance which Southern Pro Musica has done regularly with the Chichester Singers. Before, we were really dependent on a pick-up team of freelance players which didn't really work so well. But also there is just the great advantage of having players that play together regularly – and so we came up with Southern Pro Musica.

“The second strand is that the orchestra does its own concerts in its own right of which this concert in Chichester is one. The third strand of what we do is that we are very, very keen to introduce orchestral music to young people so that they can experience an orchestra live. Each year we give half a dozen concerts specifically for young people. We give the concerts usually two in Chichester Festival Theatre, usually two in G-Live in Guildford and usually two in Southampton. In January we gave these six concerts and it was fantastic. We have a very charismatic compere who is also a magician and in January we played to more than 5,000 children. These concerts really are marvellous. The audiences get to hear eight or nine pieces in an hour.”