SONGS OF TRAVEL

Welcome to our 2022 / 23 season, Songs of Travel. It is the final instalment of our ‘Six Chapters of Enlightenment’ series here at the Southbank Centre.

The idea of a journey excites us all. Whether it is a new adventure or one we have made dozens of times before. Travel and the idea of leaving home left a deep impression on the British and European mindset in the 17th and 18th centuries. And, of course, it is one of the great literary metaphors with the promise of discovering something about ourselves on the way to our destination.

The 18th Century was a whirlwind of correspondences. International navigation was leaping forward with Captain James Cook’s maritime expeditions whilst newspapers, novels and engravings were distributing ideas and images in a manner previously unparalleled. As a result, the

The music we’ve selected for the season reflects journeys that are physical and of the mind. It is the work of creative thinkers that were able to imagine unknown places through the descriptions of others, to put the fantastical to use to satirise the contemporary, to reimagine the past in new ways, to explore our individual freedom, our sense of collective belonging, and the need to travel to find their own place in the world, a journey many of us still make today.

Thank you for joining us today and supporting not just the OAE but live performance by the whole cultural community. Music by its very existence is about community and shared journeys, an adventure that looks beyond that which divides us to seek joy in common belief.

In our two Mozart on the Road concerts we perform works by composers whose reputations were in part forged by the travel and communications revolution of the Enlightenment. CPE Bach, JC Bach and Mozart, the sole focus of tonight’s programme, all found that leaving home was their route to personal discovery. If the means to travel had advanced, the mechanisms by which ideas were circulating leapt forward even more dramatically. Newspapers were becoming increasingly common – what we now know as The Times was first published in 1785 – and composers were increasingly able to take control of the commercial dissemination of their work (in no small way due to JC Bach himself, who had a won a landmark copyright legal case in 1777). Social change meant that a revolution was under way in the models by which professional musicians operated and audiences experienced music. This was exemplified by JC Bach’s London concert series and Mozart’s entrepreneurial activity in Vienna, which gave rise to the first two pieces on this evening’s programme.

Whether we are seasoned fans of Mozart or new to his music it seems he never loses his ability to astonish us. The remarkable fact about the three pieces performed tonight is not that they all date from the same year, 1784, but that they are only a snapshot of his achievements; his output that year also included five other very fine piano concertos, a number of highly regarded sonatas, and he continued work on what became known as the ‘Haydn Quartets’.

There will be a pre-concert talk with Kristian Bezuidenhout, Katherine Spencer and Roger Montgomery at 6.00pm in the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall Foyer.