Czech Philharmonic ⬩ Giovanni Antonini

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was just 35 years old when he died prematurely in 1791. The Requiem he was writing on commission remained unfinished, and it was not until the following year that his former student Franz Xaver Süssmayr gave the work its final form.

On the other hand, it was in 1806 that the 35-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven found himself in the midst of a fruitful period of creativity. That fruitfulness largely determined the future fate of his Fourth Symphony, finished that autumn. It came in between two symphonies of colossal importance, the Eroica and the Fifth Symphony with its fate motif, but unlike its serious-minded siblings, it exudes an atmosphere of joy and lightness. Robert Schumann compared this lesser-known work to “a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants”.

Beethoven studied and admired the music of Mozart, his elder by 14 years, but the question of whether the two composers ever met remains a subject of conjecture. We can only say with certainty that Mozart’s Requiem was played in 1827 at a memorial honouring the recently deceased Beethoven.

For a third time, the conductor Giovanni Antonini has prepared the Czech Philharmonic Youth Orchestra to play the first half of a classical evening. About his collaborations with musical beginners, this specialist in the informed interpretation of music of the Baroque and Classical eras says: “Explanations for young people have to be very clear even in my own mind. Working with them is a way to clear up lots of things even for myself, about which I might have previously thought: ‘Well, that’s obvious.’” According to the founder of the ensemble Il Giardino Armonico, the frequent absence of detailed instructions for performers in classical music lures one to go on an expedition into “a hidden world that the players can discover”.