Ana Paula Russo with orchestra La Nave Va

Exsultate, jubilate K.1 65, motet for solo soprano, is one of the best-known works of W. A. Mozart.

Its brilliance results from the enthusiasm of a very young Mozart, who, at the age of just 16, and in the last days of 1772, met the virtuoso castrato Venanzio Rauzzini (1746-1810) at the Duke’s court in Milan. His vocal range and skills so impressed the young Austrian composer that the latter was inspired to write one of the most immortal pieces of music, with his composition being premièred on 17 January 1773 in that same Italian city.

The exuberance of its Alleluja certainly belongs to the collective imagination of us all.

And it is the exuberance and happiness of that piece, revived and renewed if only for a short while, that we hope will represent a definitive turning of the page in the history of this pandemic that has stricken us all. The ensemble La Nave Va, conducted by the no less virtuoso António Carrilho, will be bringing us this music as part of a program conceived as an invitation. An invitation to the audience to let themselves be guided by the comfort of the brilliant, warm baroque harmonies created by some of the most remarkable composers from that time, such as Telemann or C. P. E. Bach, crowned here by the redeeming message of J. S. Bach’s cantata Jauchzet Gott in Allen Landen BWV 51 (“Praise ye God in every nation! All that heaven and the world of created order hold must be now his fame exalting”).

Jenny Silvestre