A Viennese House Party

Lights up on four friends who get together to play string quartets (wild boys!). History remembers two of them as the greatest composers who ever lived – but who are the other two?

Tonight, all four take centre stage with time on their side, night-time string vibes and low notes stealing the show … if you think pop has all the fun, wait till these four have begun.

The scene: Vienna, 1780s. The city is buzzing to the music of Joseph Haydn and his contemporaries Carl von Dittersdorf and Jan Vanhal, and a younger arrival, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Gossip in the gazettes and coffee houses is of the four getting together in a supergroup quartet. Perhaps trying out some of the cutting-edge musical ideas they’d later drop on Vienna’s concert-going public.

In time, Dittersdorf and Vanhal slip from the spotlight their more famous friends have owned for centuries, but tonight’s concert rewinds the story. The music of the whole quartet breathes again. It lasts.

Dittersdorf’s symphony The Four Ages of the World is a bold experiment in musical storytelling without words inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Its four movements – ‘Gold’, ‘Silver’, ‘Bronze’ and ‘Iron’ – time travel through different human civilisations.

Mozart was a fan of Vanhal’s symphonies, and it seems the older composer is returning the compliment in his bassoon concerto.

Mozart’s Serenata notturna is a stylish party piece in which a quartet of two violins, viola and double bass lead the revellers, including a rogue timpanist determined to be the heart and soul!

Haydn’s Clock Symphony is all precision grooves in the hands of a master craftsman, slipping his fascination with the technology of his time into his creations.