Andermatt Music: Flauto Favoloso

In the New Year's concert, flautist Maurice Steger whirls into the new year with the Swiss Orchestra. The audience can expect a surprising musical start to the year 2025.

About the program:
Composing according to classical rules of art requires a thorough knowledge of musical counterpoint techniques and principles. When writing music, please ensure that the voice leading is logical and singable, avoid excessive and unpleasant leaps and make sure that the voices are well balanced; fifth and octave parallels between the voices are forbidden, the correct treatment of leading tones is assumed; harmonic progressions and chord changes must be logical and tonally satisfying; different motivic treatments such as repetition, variation or contrast should be used; of course, rhythm, form, dynamics, articulation, timbre and expressiveness must also be interesting. And the most important thing is to remain supple despite all the rules, otherwise it won't be an inspired work and you run the risk of being mocked by Mozart himself: For in his Divertimento K. 522, entitled "A Musical Jest", Mozart took aim at precisely those amateurish composers who lacked technical skill and musical imagination.

In his satire on the symphony genre, Mozart played with expectations: Much of the music sounds coarse, unimaginative, oblique and off-kilter, is too slow - and thus probably adapted to the abilities of his musicians - the horns don't hit the notes and the most important theme in the trio of the second movement is a scale over two octaves. Of course, compositional techniques, styles and tastes change over the centuries, but all the composers at the New Year's Concert with the Swiss Orchestra were at the height of their time and were masters of their craft: This applies to the early classical Lucerne composer Joseph Franz Xaver Dominik Stalder as well as to the Venetian Baroque hero Antonio Vivaldi, to Anton Heberle, about whose life not much more is known than that he is said to have invented a walking stick recorder in Vienna, and - although some would like to deny this to both of them - also to Johann Strauss and his son of the same name.

Maurice Steger shines on the recorder and shows how beautiful, delicate, clear and pure this instrument, which is probably the most underestimated in music history 'thanks' to early musical education, can sound. So Flauto Favoloso - here's to a good 2025!

Program:
Joseph Franz Xaver Dominik Stalder
Symphony in E flat major

Anton Heberle
Concerto for recorder and orchestra in G major

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Divertimento in F major KV 522 ("A musical joke")

Antonio Vivaldi
Concerto for recorder in G major op. 10/6 RV 437

Fabian Müller
Fantasia folcloristica

Johann Strauss (son)
Tik-Tak Polka

Johann Strauss (father)
Radetzky March

Maurice Steger, recorder
Swiss Orchestra
Lena-Lisa Wüstendörfer, conductor


Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.