MEMETERIA by Thomas May

A week after its sold-out immersion in Winterreise with baritone Charles Robert Stephens (on Schubert’s birthday), Seattle Chamber Orchestra presents a program exploring the fortepiano – the kind of keyboard Mozart knew.

Mozart had to carve out his own path as a freelance artist in Vienna during the final decade of his career. He relied on his reputation as a celebrity virtuoso to cultivate a core audience, largely through his dazzlingly inventive series of piano concertos (as we call them), which he typically premiered in subscription concerts that doubled as crucial fundraising opportunities.

Conductor and pianist Lorenzo Marasso, SCO’s founder and music director, has curated a program around two of these concertos, which will be performed using a fortepiano: K. 449 in E-flat major and K. 488 in A major, with Tamara Friedman and Marasso as the soloists. He will also conduct SCO in Mozart’s Divertimento in D major, K133, and the great G minor Symphony, K. 550.

“A fortepiano is an early piano,” Marasso explains. “In principle, the word fortepiano can designate any piano dating from the invention of the instrument by Bartolomeo Cristofori in 1698 up to the early 19th century. Most typically, however, it is used to refer to the mid-18th- to early-19th-century Viennese instruments, for which composers of the Classical era, especially Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, wrote their piano music.”

The concertos will be performed on a replica of just such a Viennese fortepiano, which was built by Rod Regier and is borrowed from the collection of historical keyboards of Prof. George Bozarth and Tamara Friedman. 

The concert will be held on 7 February 2025 at Plymouth United Church of Christ in downtown Seattle (1217 6th Ave). A pre-concert talk will take place at 7:15pm; the performance begins at 8pm. Admission includes the pre-concert talk and the performance, accompanied by drinks and appetizers. Tickets here.

PROGRAM:

Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART 

Divertimento in D major K133

Piano Concerto No. 14 in E-flat major K449

Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major K488

Symphony No. 40 in G minor K550

Tamara Friedman fortepiano
Lorenzo Marasso fortepiano & conductor
Seattle Chamber Orchestra

Seattle Chamber Orchestra provides this bio:

The newly formed SCO is rooted in our cherished Pacific Northwest’s casual and open culture and brings together the region’s top instrumentalists to create an all-sensory experience of music where you are invited to be part of the experience rather than merely witnessing it. Founded in 2021, the Seattle Chamber Orchestra seeks to bring music lovers tantalizing combinations of the traditional and contemporary repertoire, performed by world-class professional musicians. Brought to life through thoughtful programming that educates as much as it inspires, SCO seeks to reinvigorate live classical music by providing opportunities for musicians and audiences to explore traditional and new music and challenge established boundaries.

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