Cast
Kammerorchester Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach
Hartmut Haenchen — Conductor
Program notes
A music lesson introducing the world of the Jupiter Symphony, the last and the greatest of Mozart's symphonies.
With this film you will enter, step by step, the world of the Jupiter, the greatest and most spectacular symphony by Mozart. Written in sixteen days in 1788 by Mozart at the age of 32, his last symphony, Symphony No. 41 in C Major, is the sum total of his mastery of composition, a little like Bach's Art of the Fugue. To know it from the inside is also to know Mozart better and to penetrate the mysteries of a piece that holds a key place in the history of music: it represents the perfection of the classical form at the time. The next step was made by Beethoven.
The conductor, Hartmut Haenchen (he conducted Wagner's Parsifal at the Opéra Bastille in 2008), takes you by the hand and opens all the doors of the Jupiter Symphony. Each movement is explained with such simplicity that the uninitiated will have no trouble understanding the mechanisms, especially since the commentaries are illustrated by musical examples. These excerpts come from a concert given by the Carl Philip Emanuel Bach Kammerorchester conducted by Hartmut Haenchen in 2005 at the Konzerthaus in Berlin. The initiated will appreciate the clarity of the presentation and the integrity of the interpretation.