BIG SING//Mozart

July 20, 2011, 7pm

Performed with organist Michael Stairs.

About this concert

Back by popular demand! Experience the Mozart Requiem “from the inside out” in our popular BIG SING format. You will be surrounded by the voices of hundreds and invited to sing this this choral masterpiece with us. Bring your own score or borrow one at the door. This all-Mozart concert is perfect for an after-work excursion with colleagues or the whole family.

About this composer

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a prolific aBIG SING//Mozartnd influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers.

Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood in Salzburg. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. At 17, he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg, but grew restless and travelled in search of a better position, always composing abundantly. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of Mozart’s death. The circumstances of his early death have been much mythologized. He was survived by his wife Constanze and two sons.

Mozart learned voraciously from others, and developed a brilliance and maturity of style that encompassed the light and graceful along with the dark and passionate. His influence on subsequent Western art music is profound. Beethoven wrote his own early compositions in the shadow of Mozart, of whom Joseph Haydn wrote that “posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years.”