You have been dreaming of conducting Mozart’s three last symphonies in one concert for several years now...
That’s right and now I have the chance to do it! Each of these symphonies can obviously stand alone but together they form a sort of trilogy: by their style, by the fact that they were composed to be performed together, and because they represent the pinnacle of achievement in the history of the symphony.

It is said that the Jupiter symphony gives the impression of having been written as the final symphony of the composer, that it crowns Mozart’s symphonic savoir-faire...
That’s exactly how I see it. Mozart is here at the pinnacle of his art. By putting the three side by side I bring to life an amazing structure. Their three keys of E flat Major, G minor and C Major are related and, for me, such a relationship is not there by chance. Plus the three symphonies were written in less than two months, and, at the end of they day, they were not commissioned which was unusual at that time.

Nevertheless they were not performed during Mozart’s lifetime.
That’s right. They were the work of a lifetime and can be compared to Bach’s The Art of Fugue - a work that encompasses all his knowledge and exceeds all that has gone before. Mozart composed these three last symphonies as a man liberated from all constraints of place and performance. From a technical point of view these symphonies fascinate me. In all three you will hear to what an extent Mozart was influenced by Bach at the end of his life. Of course we can also hear this in The Magic Flute and in the fugues he composed. The Jupiter Symphony is sometimes, wrongly to my mind, referred to as the symphony with the long fugue. But that which appears to be fugal in the finale is in fact a convincing sample of contrapuntal technique where Mozart, in the finale coda, superimposes the five major themes and links them one to the other! Every time I hear this it gives me goose bumps! Everything that precedes this coda in the three symphonies prepares us for this sublime moment, this pinnacle of compositional genius, where Mozart does not remain riveted to technique but delivers music of the highest emotional content.

By performing the three symphonies one after the other, is your idea to make us aware of this structure?
Yes, above all I want to concentrate on this pinnacle, the coda, and to reveal the great structure of these three symphonies, where the G minor symphony is the central slow movement and the C Major symphony is the radiant finale.

What challenge does this present to the conductor and the orchestra?
The orchestral repertoire includes a number of difficult works. However Mozart remains difficult for all his performers: no note is superfluous, everything must be played to perfection concerning the balance, the articulation, the phrasing… Moreover to prepare three symphonies within the normal rehearsal period is quite a challenge, too!

I imagine that for this Mozart project you will be assiduously researching sources for accuracy and phrasing?
What strikes me in many so-called authentic performances is that Mozart is often delivered in a rather choppy fashion, with lots of staccatos and with little attention to the melody line or the whole phrasing. Yet in his letters Mozart happily talks about his music in terms of it being cantabile! Therefore I intend to bring out these melody lines, which of course won’t stop me from respecting the different articulations. Another element which I deem to be important is the variation that Mozart introduces in the motifs and themes. He generally composed from memory which creates a certain tension in his compositions. He often forgot what he had written at the beginning of a piece and so, as a result, he often introduced variations in some of the smaller details. From experience I know that this regularly produces questions from the musicians who tend to think that each motif should always be played the same way; however, I don’t want to eliminate these small differences – far from it as they give the themes a different character and that for me is part of the principle of dualism that is found in the Classical period. Unlike the Baroque period where each piece of music was a complete unit based on one musical idea, these symphonies develop and oppose themes. This is what makes the Classical period – and in particular these three last symphonies of Mozart – particularly fascinating.

Interview by Marie Mergeay