Musica Viva Australia: Mozart’s Clarinet

The Spirit of Invention.

Vienna, 1785. Johann Friedrich Schink is blown away by a new work featuring the clarinet and basset horn. ‘Oh, what a glorious effect it made – glorious and great, excellent and sublime!’ he writes of Mozart’s Serenade ‘Gran Partita’.

Eighteenth-century Vienna was alive with musical inventions. The clarinet, basset horn, and fortepiano were expanding the possibilities for composers like Mozart and the young Ludwig van Beethoven.

Performers and early music scholars Nicola Boud, Simon Cobcroft, and Erin Helyard bring their infectious enthusiasm for 18th-century innovation to the much-loved chamber music of these trailblazing composers.

Travel back to the future with three dynamic artists to hear these glorious works as if for the first time.