Featuring some of the most famous Mozartians of our day, the Mozart Week Festival celebrates Mozart each year at around the time of his birthday in January and takes place in the picturesque town in which he was born. In 2024 the festival will be held from 24 January to 4 February.
For the Festival’s intendant, Rolando Villazón, Mozart’s works are the radiant centre of the world’s leading Mozart Festival, they are its soul and its inspiration. But these works are always meaningfully interwoven with ones by other composers. In 2024 arguably the most infamous of Mozart’s rivals, Antonio Salieri, sets foot on the stage of the Mozart Week Festival.
„No contemporary is mentioned in the same breath as often as Antonio Salieri,” explains Rolando Villazón. „Many myths and stories are bound up with the ambivalent relationship between these two men, and we should like to retell these myths and stories in the most varied ways not only in concerts but also as a thrilling drama through the medium of opera, the spoken theatre, films and other exciting formats.”
The 2024 Mozart Week Festival features three works that focus on the rivalry between these two composers and, above all, on the legends that have grown up around them: Peter Shaffer’s stage play Amadeus of 1979; Miloš Forman’s brilliant film version of five years later, which received no fewer than eight Oscars; and Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Mozart and Salieri, which will be presented as a marionette play with live musical accompaniment. Also on the programme is a semi-staged performance of Mozart’s opera La clemenza di Tito with Le Concert des Nations – one of the best-known of today’s period ensembles – under Jordi Savall.
There will additionally be orchestral concerts, chamber music recitals, films, guided tours, talks and much more. In 2024 we are expecting a handpicked team of artists, including Emmanuel Pahud, Isabelle Faust, Antoine Tamestit, Avi Avital, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Kristian Bezuidenhout and ensembles and orchestras that include the Cappella Andrea Barca under Sir András Schiff, the Danish Chamber Orchestra under Ádám Fischer, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under Kirill Gerstein, the Chamber Orchestra of Basel under Giovanni Antonini with Sabine Meyer as their soloist and the Hagen Quartet.
The world-famous Vienna Philharmonic has been appearing at the Mozart Week Festival since 1956 and will be heard at three concerts in 2024. At the first, two acclaimed stars will be sharing the platform: Joana Mallwitz and Igor Levit, who will be performing Mozart’s „Jenamy” Concerto K271. At the second concert Lahav Shani will be conducting Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante K364 with a line-up of soloists that includes the exceptional violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. On the same programme will be Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, his „Symphony of Fate”. At the third concert the Vienna Philharmonic under Andrés Orozco-Estrada will be performing excerpts from Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirektor and Salieri’s Prima la musica e poi le parole, bringing the Mozart Week Festival’s theme of Mozart & Salieri into even sharper focus by presenting these excerpts alongside one another. This concert will also include a performance of Haydn’s First Cello Concerto with Sol Gabetta as the soloist.
