KEY POINTS:
With just 40 days till Christmas, the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra has managed to squeeze in one more concert series, a tribute to the man the music world has gone just a little crazy about - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
It is Mozart with a difference, however. The three concerts
of The Splendour of Mozart could well be titled Mainly Mozart, because each features an out-of-the-way offering not by the man himself.
Italian Piero Bellugi makes his APO debut conducting the first two, and he is an ardent Mozartian.
"Mozart is my first love and everyone's first love, I think," he says. "I am sure the orchestra, the audience and I will all have fun.
"I think he was very charming," is Bellugi's assessment when I ask him what sort of a man Mozart might have been. "So immensely talented that when Haydn visited him, he said, 'In the name of God this is the greatest musician on earth' - and Haydn knew something about music.
"I think he was a jolly character. He liked life and had a sense of humour. What's more, his letters show he wasn't a saint. An angel, certainly, but a saint, no."
Looking through some of the music he will be playing over the next week, there may be surprises in store. Take the charming Symphony No 29 which closes tomorrow night's concert.
"We have decided it will not be so very fast at the beginning," warns Bellugi. "It's more like we are opening the door to a very mysterious world."
In the same programme, which has Henry Wong Doe returning from the States to play the Jeunehomme Concerto, is a piece from Bellugi's homeland.
Riccardo Luciani's Le Tombeau Perdu is a tribute to Mozart, its title a play on the older composer's anonymous burial place and that very 18th-century tribute, the Tombeau.
"Luciani is not so very well known," says Bellugi, "because he's so very modest, yet I have an enormous esteem for him.
"In this piece he has taken a set of four notes that Mozart often uses as a sort of signature theme - the same four you hear in the final movement of the Jupiter Symphony - twisting and turning them in all directions ... upside down, backwards and so on."
Next week, Conal Coad delves into the Russian songbook for Salieri's scheming aria from Rimsky-Korsakov's short opera, Mozart and Salieri. Buffo bonhomie is also guaranteed when Coad plays the appropriately named Buff in Mozart's one-act opera The Impresario.
"It's a brilliant and witty work, and amazingly written in just two weeks while Mozart was busy working on Figaro."
Alongside Coad, Rachelle Durkin and Rebecca Ryan play the sparring divas, Mademoiselle Silberklang and Madam Herz, while Richard Greager is the diplomatic tenor, Herr Vogelsang.
It is no surprise that the 82-year-old Bellugi has a wealth of stories. Memories of his student days fly past, working with the two Luigis of Italian modernism, Dallapiccola and Nono. He says Nono really made it into the 12-tone inner circle by marrying Schoenberg's daughter.
He also recalls Leonard Bernstein teaching him "how contagious the joy of making music could be," helping the young Italian with a scholarship at Tanglewood and then being repaid when Bellugi was his assistant for the American's TV Concerts for Young People.
And, as far as the young go, how might he advise a would-be conductor?
"It's simple," Bellugi exclaims. "Just three things. Be steady, be curious and have hundreds of scores."
What: Auckland Philharmonia, The Splendour of Mozart
Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, tomorrow, 8pm; Fri Nov 24 & Thu Nov 30, 8pm
