Mozart Remix Weekend Event

 

Mozart Remix is a performance project envisioned and presented by academics and students at the University of Southampton’s Department of Music. It takes as its point of departure the idea that the way we consume Mozart’s music in 2015 is conditioned by the ways in which is has been envisaged throughout the 214 years since the composer’s death. Mozart Remix forms a performance counterpart to the publication of the book Mozart’s Ghosts: Haunting the Halls of Musical Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), by one of the Department’s professors, Mark Everist. Over the course of four concerts, the Department of Music, led by Ian Peters, David Owen Norris and Mark Everist, explore Mozart’s music in the past and the present. One of the largest undertakings is an examination of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni viewed through the lens of Anton Schneider’s arrangement of the work for the Thurn and Taxis Court in the middle of the 1820s; this arrangement is for an astonishing ensemble based on a wind band, but including horns trumpet, trombone and even a serpent. From the same period, David Owen Norris assembles an ensemble to take a hard look at the arrangements of Mozart’s piano concertos from 1785 made by piano virtuosi in the generation after Mozart: Johann Baptist Cramer and Johann Nepomuk Hummel. Norris also co-ordinates a concert by keyboard students from the Department who look at late nineteenth-century keyboard arrangements of Mozart’s symphonies, chamber music and Edvard Grieg’s arrangements of Mozart’s piano sonatas. Mozart Remix is rounded out with three world premieres of new compositions by graduate composers in the Department of Music that reflect on Mozart’s output: Olly Sellwood’s Adagio 617, for two oboes, cor anglais and two bassoons – a response to Mozart’s Adagio and Rondo in C minor (K617), originally scored for flute, oboe, viola, ‘cello and glass harmonica; Martin Humphries’ Moz Pit for saxophone ensemble which revisits the dances from act i of Don Giovanni; and Alexander Glyde-Bates’ Re: Mozart which reworks the Fantasy in f minor for mechanical organ K. 608.

 

The performances reinforce the view, advanced in Everist’s Mozart’s Ghosts, that however much we revere Mozart’s music, our reverence is conditioned by responses from the past, and that those past responses were not necessarily to versions of Mozart’s music that we know today, but to versions ‘re-mixed’ for a variety of ensembles and in a range of forms.