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Podcast: La finta giardiniera

Katie Derham explores Mozart's charming comic opera, La finta giardiniera

Mozart’s music is one of the defining sounds of Glyndebourne, with performances of his works given almost every year since Le nozze di Figaro opened the first Glyndebourne Festival in 1934. His well-known masterworks Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte, composed between 1786 and 1790 continue to delight audiences centuries after they were written. But La finta giardiniera is lesser known, written over a decade before, in 1774 when he was just 18. Although the young Mozart was already a prolific composer by that time, this is arguably his first mature opera and is the earliest of Mozart’s operas to be performed at Glyndebourne. In this podcast director Frederic Wake Walker, conductor David Watkin and musicologist Neal Zaslaw explain how, in this charming comic opera about seven characters in search of love, we can see and hear much of the later Mozart we’ve come to adore, and plenty more besides.

Producer: Katherine Godfrey, Whistledown Productions for Festival 2014
Presenter: Katie Derham

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