(Section C)
Led by LAURANCE TURNER
Conducted by JOSEPH LEWIS
HENRY WENDON (tenor)
Lucio Silla is an early opera of Mozart's, written in Milan in 1772. Mozart was then sixteen, with half a dozen operas already to his credit. Lucio Silla was naturally composed on the Italian model, and it pleased the people of Milan before whom it was performed more than twenty times in that season. The overture is a full length work written with any amount of spirit, but it has, of course, little chance in the repertory against the other overtures of Mozart's maturity.
Tchaikovsky prefaces his score of Mozartiana with the following note: ' A great number of most admirable little compositions of Mozart are, for reasons which appear to me incomprehensible, very little known hot only to the public but to the majority of musicians. My idea in arranging several of these numbers under the title of Mozartiana is to give a new impulse to the performance of these little master-pieces, which show incomparable beauty in every line and feature '.