Camerata Salzburg

It’s complicated: There’s the composer on the one side, who composes – thus we may assume – to express himself. On the other side there’s the audience, whom the composer – again, let’s assume – wants to address on an emotional level of some kind. Our concert with Kian Soltani and the Camerata Salzburg features two composing protagonists – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the Italian Luigi Boccherini. In 1799, the latter described the purpose of music as follows: “I know well that music can speak to the heart of man, and this is what I try to achieve when I can. Music without ‘affect’ or passions is meaningless”. But music is a transient artform and has to be mediated by musicians to whom the composer has to communicate clearly and exactly what he wants them to convey. Boccherini continues: “It thus follows that the composer can achieve nothing without his performers. It’s important that they are favourably inclined towards him. Then they must feel in their hearts everything that the composer has notated. They have to come together, rehearse, investigate, and ultimately study the composer’s spirit before performing his works. If they then almost outshine him, or at least share the glory with him, then I consider it an honour to hear: ‘How beautiful is this work!’. But it means even more to me when they say: ‘How heavenly they played it!’”

It’s as if the composer places his artistic fate in the hands of his musicians. From a performer’s perspective – to quote the words of the young star cellist Kian Soltani, it means this: “When I realise it’s good, that’s when the work really begins. I then try to get as close as possible to the perfect performance, even though this is something that you can in any case never achieve”. As Salvador Dalí once said: “Don’t be afraid of perfection, because you’ll never achieve it anyway”. So all in all, we here have all the ingredients for a wonderful concert: With Boccherini, we have a composer full of humility to whom his audience and his performers were important; and in Soltani we have a soloist who strives for perfection while at the same time remaining aware of its unattainability.

And what did Mozart say? “Without music, it would all be nothing”. So it would seem as if it’s all much less complicated than we might have thought at first!