Robert Schumann wrote his Spring Symphony in “the very rapture of spring that seizes mankind even in their dotage and assails them afresh each year”. As if in a frenzy, he sketched his first large-scale orchestral work in only four days of January 1841 – two weeks later, the score was completed. The music lets us imagine “how everything that belongs to spring comes together gradually”. The music awakens as if from a winter’s torpor; it invigorates tradition with romantic verve, guiding the great form of the symphony into the future.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart also composed music about this beautiful season of renewal in the middle of winter. On 14 January 1791, he inscribed the title Sehnsucht nach dem Frühlinge (Longing for Spring) into his catalogue of works: “Come, dear May, and make the trees green again.” Nine days earlier, the Piano Concerto K. 595, which carries the beautiful spring melody as the theme of its final movement, had been entered there, too. It was to be his last piano concerto, lyrical and at times of a melancholy tone. Mozart’s Symphony No. 24, written at the age of 17, breathes a very different, youthful spirit – light and effervescent, but also of chamber-musical depth.

The Swiss conductor Mario Venzago returns to the concert stage of the State Orchestra of Lower Saxony after more than 20 years. In the meantime, he worked with Berliner Philharmoniker and at Salzburg Festival, among others, and was the primary “Schumann-conductor” of Düsseldorfer Symphoniker.