There are many specifically musical reasons why this apparently unselfconscious piece ought to be part of this series on its own terms, but my reason for including Mozart’s A Major Symphony, K201 in the series is a simple one. This was the first piece of music that I ever heard in an orchestral concert, and it was an experience that had the immediacy of an epiphany, a revelation of a new world of feeling and being. Not that I thought any of that consciously when I heard it played by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Richard Hickox, in the early 1980s; but this music symbolises, for me, the potential power of the musical experience and the start of a never-ending journey of discovery.

This symphony might have changed my own musical history, but I'm not going to argue that it changed musical history from the moment it was first written, in Salzburg in early 1774 by the 18-year-old Mozart. It’s music that crystallises the young man’s emerging compositional self-confidence, and that shows him spreading his wings in symphonic music just as he had already started to do in the opera house and in his chamber music. It’s a work that sums up everything he had heard and learnt about symphonic form up to this point in his life (the influence of JC Bach was still crucial for him, whose music he had first heard as a child in London) but which is much more than the sum of those influences, and is something that only Mozart could have written. For not-quite-but-almost the first time, this is Mozart’s individual symphonic voice that you hear loudly and clearly.

Or rather, softly and sensually. The first movement opens with the opposite of the grand rhetorical flourish that the vast majority of contemporary symphonies (including Mozart’s own) start with. The first thing you hear is a soft, descending octave in the first violins, the simplest of musical ideas, and a stepwise progression up the first four steps of the A major scale – along with a little chromatic agitation - over some serenely, almost ecclesiastically sonorous polyphony in the lower strings. This theme is then repeated, loudly, and with the addition of a canon: two beats later, the violas and cellos have the same theme as the violins, but at the third and fifth of the chord rather than the tonic - which means there’s a greater harmonic and contrapuntal richness than when we first heard the melody. In the space of 30 seconds or so, Mozart has used an enormous arsenal of sophisticated compositional techniques to create a miniature symphonic drama.

And that’s just the first theme. What’s wonderful about this symphony is how much Mozart is clearly enjoying himself, in the extra melody he composes at the end of the first section of the first movement, a joyous little tune that symbolises the sheer invention of this symphony; in the contrapuntal conversation between the violas and the cellos and basses in the movement’s central section; and in the cheekily inventive coda, with its chromaticism and, again, its counterpoint, this time in an outrageously fulsome four parts.

It’s worth remembering at this point that Mozart, like all talented 18-year-olds, would not have been thinking of himself as anything less than the fully-formed article as a composer. This wasn’t a transitional work for him, or a piece that heralded his maturity – all that’s mere historical hindsight. Aged 18 he was already an astonishingly experienced composer, writing the most expressive and adventurous instrumental music he had ever composed. That sense of confidence radiates through the slow movement, a languidly beautiful pastoral piece in D major, coloured by the soft-focus glow of muted strings, which creates a nocturnal world of expressive and even erotic pleasure. There are hints, too, of mysterious shadows in the moonlight, in the low-register trills in the violins in the middle of the movement, and the splinters of high-register interruption, also in the violins, just after the main melody has been reclaimed.

All that, and a brilliant, undance-ably imaginative Menuetto third movement, and a finale of unstoppably dazzling energy, which, played at the right tempo – it’s marked “Allegro con spirito”, after all – ought to have a tempestuous and sometimes rustic wildness, climaxing in another breathtaking little coda, which begins with a thrilling unison statement of the theme, and includes some raucous horn-calls and a rocketing string line before the final chords. Actually, you know what, I’ve changed my mind: this piece really is a symphonic and historic epiphany, whether you’re seven years old or 107! Enjoy.

Two key recordings



I’ve only chosen two performances here, from extreme ends of orchestral performance practice: the first, by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic (the first three movements only, bizarrely, are on YouTube) was the single most played tape of my childhood, and I still think the performance stands out for its warmth, sensuality, and character (one tiny example: listen to the way those Berlin Phil second violins and violas luxuriate in the richness of the polyphony right at the start! - they don’t make ‘em like that any more, more’s the pity). See what you think; and then, from the other end of the spectrum, there’s Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music, playing the symphony with all the repeats, as I now realise it should be - and with tremendous insight and energy, too. The whole thing is on YouTube, with a scrolling full score, here.