Mozart Requiem BBC Proms

Tonight, an orchestra always warmly welcomed at the Proms,

playing rich and glorious music by Mozart.

It's the Budapest Festival Orchestra this evening, conducted

And we're going to focus on the final year of Mozart's life -

something of a tragic gift to the romantic imagination.

A truly unique musical figure, taken from the world aged just 35,

at a time when he was writing music of almost unearthly beauty.

Mozart's magnificent Requiem, unfinished when he died on the 5th

Fischer and his Hungarian musicians are going to set it in context

with two other works from the same astonishing period.

Let's just listen to the tuning for a moment. Not like the normal tuning

you get. Playing a bit of Mozart's Magic Flute to get to the right

note. first performed in Prague just two

months before Mozart's death. And we start with the concert aria

Per Questa Bella Mano - By Your Lovely Hand -

which Mozart composed for his friend Franz Xaver Gerl,

a fine bass, and the theatre's talented principal

double bass player. Gerl had premiered the role

of Sarastro in Mozart's He was a member of the company

at the Freihaus-Theater in Vienna, and Mozart also honoured

the theatre's talented principal double bass player with a virtuosic

and highly challenging solo part. Hanno Muller-Brachmann

will sing the aria, alongside Mozart's concert aria

Per Questa Bella Mano, sung by Hanno Muller-Brachmann

with solo double bass player Hanno Muller-Brachmann replacing

at short notice Neal Davies, Zsolt Fejervari has been

principal double bass of the Budapest Festival Orchestra

for over 20 years. He's also a lecturer at the Franz

Liszt Academy of Music. Hanno Muller-Brachmann

began his musical training Hanno Muller-Brachmann

was on tour with Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra

earlier this year, Next, Mozart's Clarinet Concerto,

one of his most popular works, though it's unlikely that he ever

heard it performed himself. The velvety, luxurious sound

of the clarinet was relatively new at the time Mozart was writing -

the instrument hadn't been available He'd heard it only on his

travels around Europe. As he wrote to his father,

"Ah, if only we had clarinets too! "How much finer and better our

orchestra might be". Thankfully, all this

changed in the early 1780s, when Mozart moved to Vienna,

and he was quick to put the instrument to good

use in piano concertos, symphonies, operas

and chamber music. No surprise that he was keen

to write a clarinet concerto. His friend and fellow

Freemason Anton Stadler was the first great virtuoso

clarinettist, and Mozart When Stadler premiered

the concerto in Prague in 1791, he played in on a basset clarinet,

an instrument he'd helped to create with the Viennese

instrument-maker Theodor Lotz, adding four extra notes to

the bottom of the clarinet's range. It's this sort of instrument that

soloist Akos Acs, principal clarinet of the Budapest Festival Orchestra,

will be playing tonight. So now here comes Akos Acs

with conductor Ivan Fischer, to perform Mozart's Clarinet

Concerto in A major with Akos Acs was the soloist in Mozart's

Clarinet Concerto in A major, with the Budapest Festival Orchestra

conducted by Ivan Fischer. Written for the basset clarinet and

played this evening with that extraordinary, rich depth in the

sound of the solo part. So lustrous, rich and velvety. Mozart wrote the

work for his friend who was the lucky recipient of the clarinet

parts in other works by the composer, including the Clarinet

Quintet, written shortly before the concerto. One listener wrote of the

plane, I never thought the clarinet could be capable of imitating a

human voice so deceptively as it was imitated by you. Truly your

instrument has so soft and lovely a tone that nobody who has a heart can

resist it. And what a lovely town from him this evening. From the

Hungarian town. Joined the Budapest Festival Orchestra on a scholarship

since 2002 and has been the principal clarinet for the last 17

years. It is his mother who encouraged him

to take up an instrument. He went to Budapest and studied at the

conservator and the academy. CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

What a great encore! Akos Acs played Sholem-Alekhem,

Rov Feidman - "Peace be upon you, Rabbi Feidman", by the Hungarian

clarinettist Bela Kovacs. That piece written to him as a

tribute. Played as an encore here at the BBC Proms. That's APs that the

Budapest Festival Orchestra play in a series of concerts that they give

in abandoned synagogues. -- that is a piece of music. It often finds

many a central square, now abandoned and no longer used for worship. He

tells me he takes that to make a point about the Jewish heritage of

music in Hungary. A splendid encore from tonight's soloist.

We move onto the jewel in the crown of tonight's Prom, Mozart's Requiem.

Mozart was still working on it when he died and the story

of its composition is full of mystery.

Over the years, speculation has run rife as fact and fiction

What we do know is that an anonymous agent approached Mozart asking

This man was acting on behalf of a nobleman who wanted

to commemorate the death of his wife by an annual performance

Though Mozart would write it, it's thought the Count intended

Mozart agreed to the commission - he was short of cash.

After his death, Mozart's widow Constanze decided to

have the Requiem completed by her husband's pupil Franz Xaver

It's unclear whether Sussmayr had discussed the work with Mozart.

Some sources at the time describe Mozart on his death-bed,

dictating ideas, or there may have been long-lost sketches that

I asked tonight's conductor, Ivan Fischer, about his own approach

to this remarkable music, but we began by discussing

the thought behind tonight's Prom - Mozart's final year, 1791.

I wish it wouldn't be his last year, because the question is what would

have happened if Mozart had lived longer? Maybe he would have been the

great Romantic composer full stop I would love to hear works by the old

Mozart. What would he have written in a few years? It's so difficult

that he died. I can't accept it. And I think something essential happened

in his last year. Which was? He started to compose in a way which is

less formal, less serving the taste of the aristocracy, but found maybe

his own voice, or our voice, or the voice of the people, which led to

the Romantic period. Often the Requiem is staged with the thing is

standing in front of the orchestra, but here, you've placed them within

the orchestra. Can you explain the idea behind that? What does the

musicians see? The musician sees notes. They play the notes. And the

chorus is somewhere far away, and the soloist is there, and I always

found that there is something wrong here, and then I started to think

let's pack everybody together, like on a church balcony, where there is

very little room. And suddenly some magic happened, because the

instrumentalists start to listen to the text, to the words. It's

wonderful, because then they play with the full understanding of what

the music means. And does it work both ways? Does it benefit the

singers? Absolutely, because the combination of singer instrument is

a natural blending phenomenon. The instrumentalists, most of the time,

play the same lines. They help the singer and they both breathe

together. I don't need to conduct very much. We shall see just how

much conducting Ivan Fischer is going to do, the four soloists, Lucy

Crowe, mezzo-soprano Barbara Kozelj, based Hanno Muller-Brachmann, the

choir risk Collegium Vocale Gent joining the Budapest Festival

Orchestra. Mozart's Requiem, and as you can see, Ivan Fischer already

onstage, determined to avoid a grand entrance before this piece, with the

last notes that Mozart wrote within it. For this Proms performance of

Mozart's Requiem. Mozart's Requiem, performed

by the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Collegium Vocale Gent,

conducted by Ivan Fischer. performing with the choir, Collegium

Vocale Gent, spread throughout the orchestra, to encourage the

orchestral players to listen to the words as well as think about the

music, as Maestro Fischer was explaining earlier on.

But also surely to create this rich sense of theatre that we've

witnessed this evening. Whether it's true or not that Mozart said I'm

writing my own funeral music, I must not leave it unfinished, we do

absolutely no that the work we've just heard contains the last notes

that Mozart was ever to write. Between the sections that he

completed, the vocal parts and instrumental lines and the other

sections, he is responsible for two thirds of the Requiem, the work

completed partly by his student and partly, as the programme tonight

puts it, "By others". A wonderfully dark sound

from the orchestra - no flutes, oboes or clarinets, just two

basset-horns and two Benjamin Bayl, the chorus master of

Collegium Vocale Gent. This amazing orchestra from Hungary making their

11th appearance tonight at the BBC Proms, an appearance by the Budapest

Festival Orchestra, which now guarantees a sold-out while Albert

Hall, as we've seen once again this evening. -- while Albert Hall. Ivan

Fischer - such a great advocate for his home city and for the music of

central Europe, as he brings us to the end of this or-Mozart programme.

What a great night it's been. The Proms are back here on BBC Four on

Sunday, when you can see the great pianist.

Martha Argerich performing Liszt's first piano concerto

with Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern

But for now, from me, Petroc Trelawny, and all of us here