Was this Mozart? - Zafeiropoulos, Anastasios (2023)
A third biennial Historical Piano Summer Academy took place at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium, between July 4 and 13, 2023. The first Summer Academy (in 2018) was a reenactment of an early 19th-century “concours” of the Paris Conservatoire; the second (in 2021, skipping Covid) focused on noteworthy instruments of Beethoven’s life. This time, six young keyboardists from around the globe—Christophe Alvarez (France/Romania), Olha Dotsenko (Ukraine/Germany), Andrei Hadap (Australia), Wei Lee (Taiwan/Germany), Otto Popescu (Canada), and Tomasz Ritter (Poland)—were invited to participate in a counterfactual experiment: to apply the modus operandi of C. P. E. Bach’s Sonatas with Varied Reprises to Mozart’s early keyboard sonatas, K 279–284, played on clavichord and fortepiano. To situate this practice of varying repeats, the selected keyboardists participated in collective reading sessions, attended seminars and masterclasses by Tom Beghin (Orpheus Instituut) and Benjamin Steens (Conservatoire de Strasbourg), visited Joris Potvlieghe’s clavichord workshop, and trained in 18th-century style composition with Juliane Brandes (Universität Mozarteum). The academy culminated in two open masterclasses and two concerts, a play-through of the newly invented short pieces, and a professional video recording of the Mozart sonatas.
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Editorial review
Keywords: Declassifying the Classics: Rhetoric, Technology, and Performance, 1750-1850