Mozart's Horn

With Carla Blackwood.

In Mozart’s Horn the AHE, with soloist Carla Blackwood, invites you to explore both sides of Mozart’s mercurial nature, and to marvel that a device designed to frighten wolves creates such mellifluous and glowing music.

Mozart loved the horn, and the finest player of the day, Ignaz Leutgeb, was an old friend of the family. Mozart wrote what would become one of the most enduringly popular horn concertos of all time for his friend. Characterised as a “little love duet” between horn and violin, this work is a joyous expression of their friendship.

The program contains an even more virtuosic Quintet by Mozart’s Dutch contemporary Wilhelm Hauff, and includes the Romance in A major, an arrangement of one of Mozart’s Concerto movements, most likely by his dear and often penniless friend Michael Haydn.

AHE balances this bright period instrument cornucopia with perhaps the most emotionally troubled work that Mozart ever wrote: the magnificent String Quintet in G minor, a rare dark utterance from a steadfastly undepressed artist.

There’s a happy end, of course, but it’s one shaded by the sublimely sorrowful music that has come before.

• Program

  Hauff

  Horn Quintet in E Flat major

  Mozart

  String Quintet No. 4 in G minor K. 516

  Michael Haydn

  Romance in A flat major for Horn and String Quartet MH806

  Mozart

  Horn Quintet in E flat major K. 407

• Artists

  Carla Blackwood

  Horn

  The Australian Haydn Ensemble