Wolfgang’s Travel Notes

Wolfgang’s Travel Notes: Trinity Laban Chamber Orchestra

Writer and theatre director John Ginman has incorporated excerpts from Mozart’s letters and his contemporaries into a script to provide a lively and illuminating journey around Europe. Read by Mozart lover Edward Fox, the script will provide the setting for each of the five of Mozart’s works, including the sublime Piano Concerto No.12.

Wolfgang’s Travel Notes celebrates the first 22 years of the prodigy’s life and his travels through London, Milan, Mannheim, Paris and Salzburg. For all of its discomforts, Mozart confessed his need to travel: “A fellow of mediocre talent will remain a mediocrity whether he travels or not: but one of superior talent (which I cannot deny I possess) will go to seed if he remains in the same place.”

The programme ends with Mozart's witty A Musical Joke, astonishing partly because he managed to write it shortly after the death of his father Leopold. The work is witty and playful, and seems simple but its humour is sophisticated, and his focus is on innovation in his music.