with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra

13 & 14 OCTOBER 2017SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE

Mozart Celebration with David Robertson and Emanuel Ax

1 Dramatic Mozart / 1–3 FebDrama and passion. Don Giovanni overture, Mozart’s Symphony No.40 and his famous Piano Concerto No.20 in D minor.

2 Seductive Mozart / 5 & 7 FebCharming and seductive. Così fan tutte overture, Symphony No.39 and two piano concertos from Mozart’s golden years in Vienna (No.16 and 17).

3 Magnificent Mozart / 9–10 FebRadiant and magnificent. The Marriage of Figaro overture, the Jupiter Symphony and Piano Concerto No.27.

The inspiration, genius and timeless classical beauty of Mozart in endless variety. Played by the world’s best.

Mozart in the City at City Recital Hall

1 Mozart and the French Connection / 22 FebThe great oboist François Leleux returns to Sydney in a breezy program with a French theme.

2 Mozart and Mendelssohn / 5 AprMozart’s Bassoon Concerto and Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony: a concert brimming with optimism and high spirits!

3 Mozart and the Piano / 24 MayAustralian pianist Daniel de Borah performs Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.21.

4 Mozart’s Fantastic Flute / 12 JulA Schubert overture, Mozart’s Flute Concerto in G and the spirited Linz Symphony.

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Mozart & Me

Amadeus LiveJeffrey Schindler conductor Susanne Powell piano Cantillation Sydney Symphony Orchestra

The Saul Zaentz Company and Warner Brothers presents A Miloš Forman film

AMADEUSF. Murray Abraham

Tom Hulce

Elizabeth Berridge

Simon Callow

Roy Dotrice

Christine Ebersole

Jeffrey Jones

Charles Kay

Miroslav Ondrícek Director of Photography

Neville Marriner Film score recording conductor and supervisor

Patrizia von Brandenstein Production Design

Twyla Tharp Choreographer

Peter Shaffer Screenplay and original stage play

Produced by Saul Zaentz

Directed by Miloš Forman

FRIDAY 13 OCTOBER 2017, 7PM

SATURDAY 14 OCTOBER 2017, 1.30PM

SATURDAY 14 OCTOBER 2017, 7PM

SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE CONCERT HALL

SSO PRESENTS…

Performed with one interval of 20 minutes, and concluding at approximately 10.10pm (4.40pm for the Saturday matinee)

Amadeus Live is an Avex Classics International production

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ABOUT THE MUSICAmadeus: The Last Laugh‘Was he really like that?’

Couched in tones of disbelief, this is probably the most common question asked by someone who has seen the film Amadeus. And the answer is this: allowing for dramatic licence, Mozart was like that. He was intermittently very successful in Vienna, but profligate in his spending and too generous to his friends; his debts and poverty were real. His correspondence with his father suggests a close but difficult relationship. He was a self-confessed prankster who could ‘never resist making a fool of someone’, and going by his letters to nearly everyone but his father, his brand of humour had a distinctly scatological bent.

Only that laugh – Tom Hulce’s unforgettable piercing giggle – stands without historical evidence. We have Peter Shaffer to thank for this infuriating but brilliant dramatic device.

The second question is usually: ‘Did Salieri really kill Mozart?’ Well no, he didn’t. Salieri had no part in Mozart’s untimely death

(probably from rheumatic fever brought on by overwork). But  there were rumours in Salieri’s lifetime that he’d poisoned Mozart. Rossini, visiting the old composer in 1822, joked about it with him. And when Salieri suffered a physical and mental breakdown the following year, he did briefly accuse himself of murdering Mozart. One musical journal of the day, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, went so far as to publish the following notice:

Our worthy Salieri simply will not die…In his unbalanced imagination he apparently at times claims to have been responsible for Mozart’s early death, a delusion that no one except the poor bewildered old man really believes.

Whether Salieri killed Mozart is not the point. The question does get us closer to the real point, however, because Amadeus is not Mozart’s biography, to be compared with films such as Immortal Beloved. In both Shaffer’s original play and Miloš Forman’s film,

Romantic MozartThe Mozart who appealed to the Romantic sensibilities of the early 19th century was a dark-hued, turbulent, minor-key Mozart: the Piano Concerto No.20 in D minor (K466), Don Giovanni, the Requiem and the Symphony No.40 in G minor. This Mozart speaks powerfully to the modern imagination too. It’s no accident that the main title music for Amadeus was the restless opening of the ‘Little G minor’ symphony (No.25), composed in 1773.

Mozart’s Gran PartitaThe Gran Partita is an instrumental serenade: music intended for background at social functions, although in this particular case the music was premiered in a concert (1784), which perhaps accounts for its sophistication and expressive power. It would make very poor background music. The brooding, sighing Adagio movement is its emotional heart and few descriptions of the music rival the aptness of Salieri’s in Amadeus.

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Mozart is present not as the psychological centre of interest but as the obsession of his jealous competitor, Salieri. ‘Amadeus’ – beloved of God – is the title of this fable because Salieri’s torment emerges from what he sees as the workings of a capricious deity, unfairly doling out talent, and by implication his love, to the undeserving.

‘I was born a pair of ears and nothing else,’ Salieri says in the final scene of the play. ‘It is only through hearing music that I know God exists. Only through writing music that I could worship. All around me men seek liberty for Mankind. I sought only slavery for myself. To be owned – ordered – exhausted by an Absolute. This was denied me and with it all meaning.’ Whenever Salieri hears Mozart’s laugh – a motif that runs through play and film – it isn’t the irritating laugh of a boy-man at all, but mocking straight from heaven. ‘That was God,’ he tells the priest-confessor in the film, ‘laughing at me through that obscene giggle.’

And so the historical characters of Amadeus provide the foundation for a drama that is ultimately about the conflict of opposites and the workings of envy. The driving force is the contrast between mediocrity and genius. In the personalities of the drama there is moderation and duty versus passion and creativity. This is echoed on a theological level with Salieri’s ‘God of Bargains’ pitted against the God of grace.

The real Salieri was one of the most famous and respected musicians of his day. His operas were praised for binding ‘all the power of German music to the sweet Italian style’ and they were

‘Too many notes…’Joseph II: Too beautiful for our ears, dear Mozart, and monstrous many notes! Mozart: Exactly as many as are necessary, Your Majesty.

This, according to one of Mozart’s first biographers, Franz Xaver Niemetschek, was the exchange that took place after the premiere of The Abduction from the Seraglio. It’s an irresistible anecdote, but although it fits the posthumous myth of Mozart as the free artist, outside the Viennese establishment and guided only by innate genius, it’s almost certainly apocryphal.

Don GiovanniMozart begins Don Giovanni (and Forman Amadeus) with the crashing D minor chords of the opera’s overture – the same chords that will signal the arrival of the Don’s stone guest in the dramatic final act. Ominous and inexorable, they are juxtaposed with a nervous heartbeat in the strings and hesitant woodwind tones. In Amadeus this motif is also associated with Mozart’s father, Leopold.

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very popular. The Salieri we see on screen isn’t lying when he says this. But despite his success and influence, he knows he will be forgotten by posterity, even as Mozart’s posthumous fame increases. The fictional Salieri craves immortality. (To some extent the historical Salieri did too: he spent his old age revising and annotating his earlier operas.) And immortality is to be seized by any means – confessing to a rumour, lying to a priest – if not through fame then through infamy. That is Amadeus.

We, posterity – Ghosts of the Future, as Shaffer calls us in the play – grant immortality for the best and the most capricious of reasons. Genius will do; so will Scandal. Mozart we know because his genius speaks to every age and his music never really left the concert repertoire. Salieri we know, fairly or not, principally as Mozart’s rival, a cipher in music history. Ironically, the authors of the fictions (Forman, Shaffer, and before them Pushkin and Rimsky-Korsakov in Mozart and Salieri) have created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thanks to them, Antonio Salieri could not be better known in our time if he had murdered Mozart. He has the last laugh.

Or does he? Even Forman seems uncertain on this point. In the final frames of Amadeus, Salieri, Patron Saint of Mediocrities, grants absolution to all who feel the bite of failure, but it’s that ‘obscene giggle’ which we hear.

The Queen of the NightThe Magic Flute was composed for a vaudeville theatre in Vienna and it combines spectacle and comic entertainment with Enlightenment allegory, exoticism and coded Masonic references. The opera tests the love and nobility of its romantic leads, Pamina and Tamino, while the Queen of the Night (Pamina’s mother) and Sarastro (a Priest of the Sun) represent the conflict between dark and light, ignorance and knowledge.

In her aria from Act II – famous for its thrilling high notes – the vengeful Queen gives Pamina a dagger with which to kill Sarastro, threatening to disown her if she fails. Amadeus suggests that Mozart’s mother-in-law provided inspiration for the Queen, while others have proposed that she represents Empress Maria Theresa, who was antagonistic towards Freemasonry.

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RequiemMozart’s Requiem – his final, unfinished work – provides the dramatic and musical climax of Amadeus. A masked stranger arrives at Mozart’s door with a commission for a Requiem mass setting. Miloš Forman’s Salieri wants us to think he is behind the mask, taking the first step in a diabolical plan. Historians will tell us that the stranger was a representative of Count Walsegg, who had a reputation for commissioning music anonymously with a view to passing it off as his own work. The commission was accepted but, as Niemetschek’s biography reports, once Mozart’s health began to fail, he ‘began to speak of death, and declared that he was writing the Requiem for himself’.

Mozart completed only the Introit and Kyrie sections of the Requiem. Much of the remaining music was left in a substantial sketched form: his intentions clear but unrealised. His student Franz Xaver Süssmayr was the first to make a completion.

Amadeus: Drowning in MusicIf you’ve seen Amadeus in its original form as a play, you’ll know it’s a magnificent piece of theatre, approaching the character of 18th-century opera in its artifice. It even begins with Salieri summoning the audience with an Invocation in the manner of Gluck. In the theatre we are his confessors.

A play like that cannot simply be transferred to the realistic medium of film. The beauty of this challenge is that Shaffer and Forman were obliged to reimagine the drama, developing Mozart’s character beyond Salieri’s perspective and taking new liberties to create a very different but equally magnificent work of art.

Characters were added. The role of the audience-confessor was given to the young priest, Father Vogler, who listens downcast to Salieri’s opening recital until the charming tones of Eine kleine Nachtmusik make him smile and hum along.

And with this the main protagonist of Amadeus the film makes its entry: Mozart’s music. The drama still centres on Salieri – his envy, his delusions and his musical rivalry with Mozart – but the film is saturated with music in a way that would be impossible in the theatre. And this music is not merely background, underpinning atmosphere or emotion. As Peter Shaffer told a New York Times interviewer in 1984: the film ‘has become much more a celebration of the music.…In the film…music almost becomes a character, the most important character.’

‘This is not just because on the screen one can show operas that can only be described on stage,’ he wrote in the same year. ‘The paradox is that in a live theatre one cannot successfully play long stretches of music without subverting the drama and turning the event into a concert, whereas the cinema positively welcomes music in floods – and acoustical inundation is very much the fate of drowning Salieri. Music, sublime and unstaunchable, pouring in a stream over a gasping man’s head, is of course the central subject of the film.’

This presentation plays out that paradox: bringing this masterpiece of a film into the concert hall with a live orchestra and floods of music.

ADAPTED FROM NOTES BY YVONNE FRINDLE © 2009

PRODUCTION CREDITSAvex Classics InternationalMaggie O’Herlihy Executive Producer Jack Stookes Operations Manager Pierre O’Reilly Multimedia Ed Kalnins Technical Director Ludwig Wicki Music Supervisor Peter Schurtenberger Transcriber and copyist www.avexclassicsinternational.co.uk

Sydney Symphony OrchestraMark Sutcliffe Head of Commercial Programming Aernout Kerbert Director of Orchestra Management Jack Woods Head of Production Lynn McLaughlin Head of Ticketing Penny Evans Senior Marketing Manager Mary-Ann Mead, Victoria Grant Librarians Trent Kidd Commercial Artist Liaison

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THE ARTISTS

Jeffrey Schindler enjoys a dynamic international career that takes him from concert halls around the world to Hollywood scoring stages and London recording studios. As a conductor, he has made appearances with the Seattle Symphony, Czech Philharmonic and Australian International Symphony Orchestra Institute, and in London with the LSO, London Session Orchestra, Metro Voices, Bach Choir and Choristers of Reigate St Mary’s. He is in demand among film composers who seek the passion and refined artistry he elicits from an orchestra, and he has led the sessions for many feature film and television projects, including X men: Apocalypse, X men: Days of Future Past, Jack the Giant Slayer, The Wolfman, Astroboy, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Temple Grandin, Four Christmases, Bernard and Doris, Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Hollywood Homicide, and the most successful documentary of all time: the Academy Award winning March of the Penguins.

He is also a sought- after orchestrator and arranger, and his extensive production credits include Hotel Transylvania 2, Pee Wee’s Big Holiday, Ice Age: Eggscapade, 22 Jump Street, Cloudy 2: Revenge of the Leftovers, Gnomeo and Juliet, Superman Returns, The Invasion, Firewall and Next, as well as orchestrations for Broadway composer Stephen Schwartz.

As a virtuoso harpsichordist and organist, he has performed with a number of American orchestras, has appeared in concert with members of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra and New York Philharmonic, and given recitals throughout New England. An early music scholar, he is also a consummate basso continuo accompanist and has performed with such early music luminaries as Jaap Schröder, Stanley Ritchie and Fortunato Arico, as well as with members of Tafelmusik and Aston Magna.

He has taught at the conducting institutes in Hartford, Connecticut and Varna, Bulgaria, as well as at the Hartt School of Music, the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, and he is in demand as a conducting teacher and coach among composers in Hollywood.

Jeffrey Schindler returns to the SSO and the Sydney Opera House having conducted live presentations of the first two films in the Harry Potter series earlier this year.

Jeffrey Schindler conductor

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Susanne Powell has enjoyed an extensive and distinguished career as a chamber musician, accompanist, orchestral pianist, academic and teacher. She studied piano with Nancy Salas and David Miller, and bassoon with John Cran, at the Sydney Conservatorium High School and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. She graduated with Honours and was awarded a Queen Elizabeth II scholarship for Young Australians to continue her studies with Heinz Medjimorec in Vienna, Bruno Canino in Italy and Geoffrey Parsons in London. While in Vienna she was awarded an Austrian Government Scholarship.

She is frequent performer and recording artist for ABC Classic FM and has undertaken national and international tours for Musica Viva Australia. She has also participated in many music festivals in Australia and overseas, and her performances at summer music festivals in Switzerland and Germany have attracted critical acclaim. She has appeared with artists such as Cho-Liang (Jimmy) Lin, Camilla Tilling, Dimitri Ashkenazy, Ilya Konovalov, Tina Gruenberg, Ofra Harnoy, Dene Olding, Roger Benedict, Kirsten Williams and Paul Goodchild, and has been accompanist for the Jacqueline du Pré masterclasses in London’s South Bank Summer Music series, the Britten-Pears Summer School in Aldeburgh and the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival master courses in Germany.

A passionate orchestral pianist, she appears frequently as principal guest keyboard with the SSO. In 2012 she was awarded the prestigious ACT Arts Creative Fellowship, which enabled her to study the techniques and repertoire of the celesta, of which she is one of the few Australian specialists. More recently she was invited to tour as the celesta player with the London Symphony Orchestra and Valery Gergiev on their 2014 Australian tour.

Susanne Powell was a Senior Lecturer in Music at the Australian National University for many years and is a mentor and tutor for the Australian Youth Orchestra.

Susanne Powell piano

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THE CHOIR

Cantillation is a chorus of professional singers – an ensemble of fine voices with the speed, agility and flexibility of a chamber orchestra. Formed in 2001 by Antony Walker and Alison Johnston, it has since been busy in the concert hall, opera theatre and recording studio.

Performances with the SSO have included Westlake’s Missa Solis, Adams’ Harmonium, Brahms’s Requiem, Edwards’ Star Chant, Haydn’s Creation, Vaughan Williams’ Flos Campi and Jonathan Mills’ Sandakan Threnody. Other highlights include The Crowd (Australian Chamber Orchestra), tours of regional NSW and performances with Emma Kirkby in Sydney and Melbourne (Musica Viva), singing for the Dalai Lama and the Rugby World Cup. Cantillation has recorded movie soundtracks (including The Lego Movie, Lego Batman and Lego Ninjago, Happy Feet 2,

CANTILLATIONLive Bait 3D, I, Frankenstein and Cane Toads, The Conquest) and recorded and filmed Jonathan Mills’ opera The Eternity Man.Cantillation has recorded more than 30 CDs and DVDs, including great choral masterpieces of the Renaissance, Prayer for Peace (a collection of contemplative 20th-century sacred works), Fauré’s Requiem, Orff’s Carmina Burana, Handel’s Messiah, Silent Night, Ye Banks and Braes (an album of folk songs), Magnificat with Emma Kirkby, Hallelujah! (Baroque choruses) and Mozart’s Requiem. Cantillation has been the official chorus for Pinchgut Opera since its inception, and appears on the Pinchgut recordings of Haydn’s L’Anima del filosofo, Rameau’s Castor & Pollux and Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride as well as the forthcoming recording of Handel’s Theodora.

SOPRANOSClaire Burrell-McDonaldBelinda MontgomeryAmy MooreAlison MorganJayne OishiJosie RyanMichaelle RyanElizabeth ScottBrooke ShelleyHester Wright

MEZZO-SOPRANOSJo BurtonKeara DonohoeAnne FarrellAmanda HamiltonAmanda HarrisJudy HerskovitsAtalya MasiLiane PapantoniouNatalie SheaNicole Smeulders

TENORSMiguel IglesiasLuke IredaleEric PetersonJohn PitmanJoel RoastEthan TaylorJoseph ToltzMichael Warby

BASSESBenjamin CaukwellCraig EveringhamNick GilbertDavid HiddenAndrew JohnstonAnthony MackeyBen MacphersonPhilip Murray

Elizabeth Scott graduated from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in 1995, having earned the Student of the Year Award and the Reuben F Scarf Scholarship for academic and musical excellence. She was Assistant Chorusmaster to Sydney Philharmonia Choirs (2006–2008) and Acting Music Director for the first half of 2013, and has been the Musical Director of VOX, SPC’s youth choir, since 2008. She is also very active in music education at The Arts Unit, a specialist

Elizabeth Scott chorusmasterbranch of the NSW Department of Education, and has been the Choral Conductor for the Schools Spectacular since 2009. Elizabeth Scott is a graduate of Symphony Australia’s Conductor Development Program and was awarded the Sydney Choral Symposium Foundation Choral Conducting Scholarship in 2008. She sings regularly with Cantillation and has performed and recorded with Pinchgut Opera and The Song Company.

Antony Walker Music Director Alison Johnston Manager Elizabeth Scott Amadeus chorusmaster Catherine Davis Rehearsal pianist

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This is a Playbill / Showbill publication

Playbill Proprietary Limited / Showbill Proprietary Limited ACN 003 311 064 ABN 27 003 311 064

Suite A Level 1, Building 16, Fox Studios Australia, Park Road North, Moore Park NSW 2021 Telephone: +61 2 9921 535318197 – 1/131017

ABOUT THE ORCHESTRASYDNEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRADAVID ROBERTSON Chief Conductor and Artistic Director

Founded in 1932 by the ABC, the SSO has evolved into one of the world’s finest orchestras as Sydney has become one of the world’s great cities. Resident at the Sydney Opera House, the SSO also performs regularly at City Recital Hall, tours NSW and internationally, and it is well on its way to becoming the premier orchestra of the Asia Pacific region.

The SSO’s concerts encompass masterpieces from the classical repertoire, music by some of the nest living composers, and collaborations with guest artists from all genres. These collaborations reflect the orchestra’s versatility and diverse appeal, and highlights have included concerts with Human Nature, Ben Folds, The Whitlams, Burt Bacharach, Dianne Reeves, George Benson,

John Farnham, Sting, Rajaton and Conchita Wurst, as well as violinist Nigel Kennedy and Japanese drumming ensemble TaikOz, and more recently Witches and tribute concerts for David Bowie and for George Michael.

The SSO also celebrates the role of the symphony orchestra in movies, television and video games with concerts such as Final Fantasy, Star Trek, The Music of John Williams, Battleship Potemkin, The Wizard of Oz, Bugs Bunny, Charlie Chaplin’s Gold Rush, Gladiator, The Godfather, concerts hosted by Michael Parkinson and Clive James, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Babe and Danny Elfman’s scores for Tim Burton films.www.sydneysymphony.com

www.sydneysymphony.com/SSO_musicians

FIRST VIOLINS Kirsten Williams Associate Concertmaster

Jenny BoothBrielle ClapsonSophie ColeClaire HerrickEmily LongAlexandra MitchellAlexander NortonAnna SkálováLéone Ziegler

SECOND VIOLINS Emma Jezek Assistant Principal

Rebecca GillEmma HayesShuti HuangWendy Kong

Stan W KornelBenjamin LiNicole MastersMaja Verunica

VIOLASStuart JohnsonSandro CostantinoJane HazelwoodGraham HenningsFelicity TsaiLeonid Volovelsky

CELLOSLeah Lynn Assistant Principal

Timothy NankervisElizabeth NevilleDavid Wickham

DOUBLE BASSESDavid CampbellHugh Kluger°

FLUTES Carolyn HarrisRosamund Plummer Principal Piccolo

OBOESDiana Doherty Principal

David Papp

CLARINETSChristopher TingayDavid McGregor†‡

Oliver Shermacher*Rowena Watts*‡

‡ = Basset Clarinet

BASSOONSMatthew Wilkie Principal Emeritus

Fiona McNamara

HORNSBen Jacks Principal

Marnie Sebire

TRUMPETSPaul Goodchild Associate Principal

Yosuke Matsui

TROMBONESRonald Prussing Principal

Nick ByrneChristopher Harris Principal Bass Trombone

TIMPANIRichard Miller Principal

PERCUSSIONTim Brigden*Brian Nixon*Philip South*

HARP Genevieve Lang*

ORGAN & CELESTA Catherine Davis*

° = Contract Musician* = Guest Musician † = SSO Fellow

THE MUSICIANS

Experience the original musical film like never before, live with the SSO! Winner of 6 Academy Awards® including Best Original Score and Best Original Song.

Your SSO will be conducted by Oscar winning composer Justin Hurwitz.

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