FROM THE MOZ­ART WEEK 2015

Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546
March of the Priests from The Ma­gic Flute, K. 620
Ma­son­ic Fu­ner­al Mu­sic, K. 477
Dav­ide pen­it­ente, K. 469

The present­a­tion of Dav­ide pen­it­ente at the Moz­art Week 2015 is an event for all the senses: by bring­ing to­geth­er the Salzburg Moz­art tra­di­tion and con­tem­por­ary cul­ture with the Académie équestre de Ver­sailles un­der Bart­a­bas in an un­usu­al and yet ob­vi­ous loc­a­tion – The Felsen­reit­schule – new and sur­pris­ing per­spect­ives are offered for what is only seem­ingly to be the thor­oughly known œuvre of Wolfgang Amadeus Moz­art.

Dav­ide pen­it­ente at the Felsen­reit­schule Salzburg gives us a pen­it­ent king whose psalms are set to mu­sic of sub­lime rigour and to in­spired vir­tu­oso arias; it gives us tra­di­tion­al baroque chor­al mu­sic com­bined with the in­di­vidu­al­ised im­pact of so­los; and it gives us horses, cho­reo­graphed by a mas­ter.

The artist­ic col­ab­or­a­tion between Marc Minkowski, Les Mu­si­ciens du Louvre Gren­oble, out­stand­ing sing­ers, and the French equine artist and theatre prac­ti­tion­er Bart­a­bas to­geth­er with the Academy of Eques­tri­an Arts turns Moz­art’s can­tata in­to a unique ges­amtkunstwerk.

Bart­a­bas’s art can hardly be cat­egor­ized – his in­ter­pret­a­tion of Moz­art’s mu­sic brings to­geth­er horses and hu­man be­ings, mu­sic, move­ment, light and cos­tumes in a po­et­ic syn­thes­is of all the arts. In the Felsen­reit­schule he in­nov­at­ively fo­cuses the lime­light on the stars for which this unique ven­ue was cre­ated over three cen­tur­ies ago: horses.

“The mem­bers of the Vi­enna So­ci­ety for the Pro­tec­tion of Wid­ows and Orphans de­man­ded an ora­tor­io of Moz­art … The time be­ing, however, too short for a new com­pos­i­tion, he took out an un­fin­ished Great Mass and fit­ted to it an … Itali­an … text, ad­ded arias and duets, and so arose the so called ora­tor­io: Dav­ide pen­itene, in which the chor­uses were re­moved from the Kyrie and Glor­ia and a solo for three parts ad­ded to the fugue.” Thus Max­im­il­an Stadler, the ex­ecut­or ap­poin­ted by Moz­art’s wid­ow to settle his mu­sic­al es­tate, de­scribes the gen­es­is of the can­tata, as it is now called, which was based on the com­poser’s “Great Mass in C minor”, the most im­port­ant, along with the Re­quiem, of his un­com­pleted works.

Bart­a­bas, dir­ect­or & cho­reo­graph­er
Académie Équestre de Ver­sailles

Marc Minkowski, con­duct­or
Les Mu­si­ciens de Louvre Gren­oble

Chris­ti­ane Karg, sop­rano
Mari­anne Cre­bassa, mezzo-sop­rano
Stan­islas de Barbeyrac, ten­or

Salzbur­ger Bach­chor
Alois Glassner, chor­us mas­ter
Ber­trand Couderc, light­ing de­sign­er

Eques­tri­ans:
Bart­a­bas, Laure Guil­laume, Em­manuelle Santine, Em­manuel Dardenne, Anna Kozlovskaya, Émilie Tal­let, Char­lotte Tura Dubios, Ad­rien Sam­son, Sever­ine De­perrois, Maïlys Frougneux, Cecile Lom­bard, Zoe San Mar­tin

Horses:
Le Cara­v­age, Quilate, Chagall, Uc­cello, Le Curieux, Le Dormeur, Le Fourbe, Le Grinch­eux, L’In­quiet, L’In­trep­ide, Le Nerveux, Le Ruse