Two Times Mozart at the Thermal Spring Colonnade

Both works included in the day’s concert were written while Mozart was in the services of Salzburg’s Archbishop Hieronymus von Colloredo, for whom he began working at age seventeen. Despite his youth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was already an experienced composer at the time. Over the previous years, he had visited practically all of Europe’s most important courts in the company of his father, including Vienna, Paris, and London, and had composed more than twenty symphonies and seven operas. The violin concerto in B major was Mozart’s first concerto for solo instrument. Over the subsequent four years, he composed another four violin concertos, all of which are still regularly played today. Although it is one of his early works, the Symphony in A Major clearly shows Mozart’s exceptional compositional talent. It combines his practically limitless melodic inventiveness with an extraordinary sense for the use of all the colorful possibilities of the classical orchestra.