The Cape Symphony’s upcoming September 17 & 18 concert, Mozartiana, matches up two of music’s greatest composers: Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, with “Mozartiana” and Symphony No. 4, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s own Violin Concerto No. 5.
Artistic Director & Conductor Jung-Ho Pak selected these links especially for you. Enjoy!
The concert will open with the Cape Symphony’s first performance ever of Tchaikovsky’s “Mozartiana: Theme and Variations (Based upon Piano Variations by Mozart on a Theme by Gluck),” performed in this video by the State Philharmonic Orchestra of Sibiu, Romania, conducted by Valentin Doni. You know Tchaikovsky from his ballets Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, as well as "The 1812 Overture," recently performed by the Cape Symphony at our Joy4July show! His emotional style, during what would later be called the Romantic period, was quite different from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s, but he admired the great Classical composer and actually called him a god. Tchaikovsky wrote “Mozartiana,” in tribute to Mozart.
In 2019, Clarissa Bevilacqua won the Cape Symphony International Violin Competition, in which Jung-Ho Pak sought a new artist to perform with the orchestra in May 2020. Clarissa is a violin prodigy, debuting at the Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago in front of ten thousand people when she was nine years old. She received her Bachelor of Music summa cum laude at age sixteen, and in 2021, she completed her Master of Music degree in violin performance at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg.
In this video, Clarissa performs Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5, the piece she’ll play with the Cape Symphony, with the chamber ensemble Salzburg Orchestra Soloists. She won three awards for this performance at the 2020 International Mozart Competition Salzburg: First Prize, Audience Award, and Special Award for the best interpretation of a piece by Mozart.
“Our original schedule for the competition winner’s performance was put on hold by the pandemic,” explains Jung-Ho. “We’re thrilled to have Clarissa join us to perform Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 as part of our grand season opener; she was by far the most impressive entrant and her talent will astonish the audience.”
In the second half of the program, we present Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, the Romantic era composer’s most accessible and well-known work. Tchaikovsky’s music became increasingly personal and intense at this time in his career, full of emotions and colors expressed by the instruments. The Fourth Symphony can be interpreted as Tchaikovsky’s own journey of triumphing over adversity. This video performance of the fourth movement, “Finale,” features Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic.
At his famous Young People’s Concert, Leonard Bernstein talked about Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and how the composer tried to write music that would be “easily recognized as emotional.” Watch the short video.
“The Tchaikovsky Fourth is a terrific challenge for the orchestra, which they love, as do I,” says Jung-Ho. “As musicians, we’re inspired by composers who poured their passions into their work; we have to perform just as passionately.”
Join us for Mozartiana on September 17, 2022 at 7:30 PM & Sunday, September 18, 2022 at 3:00 PM. For more information and to purchase tickets for Mozartiana, visit capesymphony.org, call the Box Office at 508-362-1111, email
