It is always a pleasure to hear the utterly mature and natural-sounding playing of Tel Aviv-born violinist Pinchas Zukerman. Of course, his style has had time to ripen: a graduate of New York's Juilliard School of Music and a former student of Isaac Stern's, he has been playing on concert stages for 56 years. His partners in the Camerata Salzburg are themselves guardians of no little tradition: founded 65 years ago, the ensemble has had its performance style shaped by such artists as Sándor Végh, Sir Roger Norrington and Leonidas Kavakos.
Beethoven's single-movement Romance in G major opens the programme with a kind of peaceful, reverent and gentle prayer, without any of the defiance and passion that is so typical of the composer's other work. The most important feature of Schubert's Symphony No. 5 is the fact that it is the composer's most Mozartean work (just a few months before composing this symphony, Schubert had penned a few adulatory lines about his great forerunner in his diary), drawing inspiration in part from the great Symphony in G minor, in part from the Violin Sonata in F major, as well as from Die Zauberflöte.
And Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5? The A major work is an elegant and audacious composition, large in scale and full of movement and pride. All of this crowned by the triumphant virtuosity, inebriated with joie de vivre, of the closing rondo and its "Turkish” passage, spice that was considered "exotic” in the popular imagination of the time.

Presented by: Müpa Budapest