Ian Page and The Mozartists mark 250 years of Sturm und Drang at Wigmore Hall on Thursday 24 September 2026, closing on the Farewell Symphony.
The Mozartists play period instruments under Ian Page, and they are in the middle of the most audacious piece of concert scheduling in British music. MOZART 250 began in 2015, the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s childhood visit to London, and follows his life year by year in real time, programming what he wrote and what he heard in each corresponding season. It runs until 2041, the 250th anniversary of his death. This season is 1776.
Sturm und Drang is the movement that ran through the arts in the decade before it, and Klinger’s play, which gave the thing its name, turns 250 in 2026. The programme takes it at its word: Kraus’s Symphony in C minor with arias from Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide, Jommelli’s Fetonte and Mozart’s La finta giardiniera before the interval, then Traetta’s Antigona and Haydn after it. Kraus is the find here: a Swedish court composer Haydn is said to have rated above himself.
Ian Page conducts at Wigmore Hall on Thursday 24 September 2026 with the soprano Chiara Skerath, and gives a pre-concert talk at quarter past six. It ends on Haydn’s Symphony No. 45, the ‘Farewell’, which empties the platform as it goes: the players leave in turn until two violins are left. That is a stranger thing to watch in a room this size than in the orchestral hall it usually gets.