Throughout his career, Claudio Abbado evinced a keen desire to work with young and unspoilt musicians, and it was this desire that led him to gift to the world of music one new orchestra after another. He loved working with his players with the maximum degree of intimacy and in an atmosphere of mutual understanding that encouraged them to listen to each other. In the course of his life more than a dozen wonderful ensembles were created thanks to his powerful initiative. The two most recent ones were the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, which dates back to 2003, and the Orchestra Mozart, which was established the following year as a project of the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna and financed by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna. It was with the latter that Abbado developed an especially close bond during the final years of his life, its outstanding qualities demonstrated, not least, by the many prestigious awards that it received. In one of his last interviews, Abbado himself stressed that he was never interested in “drawing a distinction between my youth orchestras on the one hand and my elite orchestra on the other. The truth of the matter is that there are few major differences between my orchestras. We are all members of one big family, performing music together and in that way helping each other out.”
The Orchestra Mozart was never simply a youth orchestra but was a highly qualified large chamber ensemble in which young musicians appeared alongside experienced figures such as the double-bass player Alois Posch, the violist Wolfram Christ and the trumpeter Reinhold Friedrich. Apart from the genius of Abbado himself, it was very much this combination of experience and youthful enthusiasm that lent the orchestra its unique and irresistible colour. It was founded in 2004 against the background of the crisis that beset the whole of Italy, where regional orchestras and opera houses were dying out in large numbers.
As such, it was a sign of the untiring optimism and thirst for action that Abbado brought to art and society right up to the end of his life, for unlike many of his colleagues of a similar age he retained his political beliefs from the 1960s and 1970s, when his work had been inspired by his left-wing sympathies. His conviction that music does not exist in a vacuum but has an emphatically ethical significance alongside its aesthetic importance bore fruit from start to finish. On Abbado’s initiative the Orchestra Mozart also played voluntarily in kindergartens, prisons and facilities for the disabled. (Julia Spinola)
As such, it was a sign of the untiring optimism and thirst for action that Abbado brought to art and society right up to the end of his life, for unlike many of his colleagues of a similar age he retained his political beliefs from the 1960s and 1970s, when his work had been inspired by his left-wing sympathies. His conviction that music does not exist in a vacuum but has an emphatically ethical significance alongside its aesthetic importance bore fruit from start to finish. On Abbado’s initiative the Orchestra Mozart also played voluntarily in kindergartens, prisons and facilities for the disabled. (Julia Spinola)
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