By Jupiter!

I’ve been preparing for our Jupiter Project concert in the spectacular Upper Drawing Room at Palace House, Beaulieu, at 6.30pm on Wednesday 4th October: sibbing the parts of Clementi’s ‘adaptation’ of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, for flute, violin, cello and piano. The photocopies of the original parts are hard to read! It was this 1823 arrangement that first named the piece ‘The Jupiter’ – hence the name of our project, which will go on to unearth the huge repertoire of orchestral music ‘adapted’ for this quartet combination – six piano concertos, twenty symphonies, thirty–nine overtures. That’s how people listened to orchestral music in the 1820s, unless they lived in a city with an orchestra. But the quartet version is no second-best – the details of the adaptations respond both to changing notions of style and to mechanical developments in the piano. Mozart and Haydn brought firmly into the nineteenth century!

We’re using Lord Montagu’s Broadwood, which was constructed at Broadwood’s Horseferry Road workshops in Westminster and sold to Lady Montagu of Boughton in 1825 for the sum of £103. She then had it transported between her London residence and Ditton Park, Slough, where it was used for concerts. It probably came to Palace House when the Admiralty purchased Ditton Park in 1917. Our programme is all Mozart, heard through the ears of the three greatest composer-virtuosos of the 1820s. Clementi’s version of the Jupiter is joined by Cramer’s version of the C major Piano Concerto (K.467) and Hummel’s versions of the overtures to Magic Flute and Figaro. With Caroline Balding, violin; Katy Bircher, flute; Andrew Skidmore, cello.