Mozart’s World: A Little Night Music
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Kati Debretzeni, director, Katherine Spencer, clarinet
The Anvil, Basingstoke. 20 January 2026
Kati Debretzeni
Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga: Overture in F minor Op. 1 (1817)
Mozart: Clarinet concerto
Michael Haydn: Divertimento in G (1780)
Mozart: Eine kleine Nachtmusik
The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is opening its 40th anniversary year with a short tour of a fascinating programme that, in inevitable OAE style, merges well-known pieces with little-known gems. They started their tour in the excellent acoustic of Basingstoke’s Anvil concert hall, a space that, although large, coped with the modest chamber-sized band with an appropriate intimacy. The three composers were linked by time, birthdays and friendship. Two of Mozart’s best-known pieces were balanced by music from his friend Michael Haydn and the extensively monikered Basque composer, Juan Crisóstomo Jacobo Antonio de Arriaga y Balzola, born in Bilbao 50 years to the day after Mozart. He was known as the ‘Spanish Mozart’ in honour of his prodigious talent, the birthdate link, and his tragically early death, just before his 20th birthday. Another link, which the concert organisers may not have noticed, is that both Arriaga and Mozart shared the same first two baptismal names (based on their birthdays being the feast of St. John Chrysostom, although Mozart’s first names of Joannes Chrysostomus didn’t last much beyond baptism.
Some 28 years after their famed 1988 Archiv recording (made under studio conditions in Snape Maltings), the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists return to the St. Matthew Passion. This extraordinary piece can evoke enormous emotional responses, regardless of the religious views of the listener. I vividly remember taking my young daughter to a performance of their 1988 Matthew, sitting in the front row, and watching the bass player just a few yards away gently shedding tears as she played. For this version, on their own label, they opt for a live recording, made in Pisa Cathedral during the Anima Mundi Festival as the culmination of a six-month tour. 
Baroque. But Stevie Wishart is a composer with roots in early and contemporary music. So rather than highlighting the melodic aspects of the instruments that are usually key to Baroque music, Wishart focused on the “resonance, overtones and sympathetic vibration” of the string orchestra, commenting that “the entire orchestra play only open strings and harmonics so that melodies only surface through a barrage of ‘sound clouds’ and gentle noise.” 
Andrew Benson-Wilson : Early Music Reviews + 