Details:
Mozart Among Friends
Gunter Theatre
Saturday, October 31 at 7:30 pm
Sunday, November 1 at 3:00 pm
PROGRAM
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Overture to Don Giovanni
Mozart: Violin Concerto No. 3
Mozart: Symphony No. 40
CONDUCTOR
Lee Mills, Music Director
Thomas A. and Shirley W. Roe Podium Fund
SOLOIST
Joanna Mulfinger, Principal Second Violin
Stuart P. Bowne Endowed Chair
Fresh off the Greenville Symphony’s season‑opening performances of Mozart’s Requiem, we return to the composer’s world — this time in the intimate glow of the Gunter Theatre, where his brilliance feels especially close and alive. In this up‑close setting, Mozart’s music sparkles: you’ll hear the wit, warmth, and emotional electricity that made him one of history’s most irresistible voices, revealed with extraordinary clarity.
The evening opens with the Overture to Don Giovanni — music that plunges us into high drama from the first notes. Legend has it Mozart completed this overture on the very morning of the opera’s 1787 Prague premiere, and you can feel that crackling, last‑minute urgency in the writing. It’s Mozart the dramatist in a nutshell: danger and delight sharing the same stage.
At the heart of the night is Violin Concerto No. 3, performed by Joanna Mulfinger, our Principal Second Violin and the orchestra’s Stuart P. Bowne Endowed Chair. A Greenville native and longtime leader on our stage, Joanna is beloved for her luminous sound and expressive poise — and this concerto fits her like a glove. Written in 1775 during Mozart’s Salzburg years, the Third brims with youthful charm and operatic grace. You’ll hear it in the opening movement’s elegant, vocal‑style themes and in the Adagio’s tender, aria‑like lines — music that sings as if from the opera house. The finale dances with folkish, playful character (listen for quicksilver exchanges between soloist and orchestra), a reminder of Mozart’s joy in transforming popular styles into high art. In the Gunter’s intimate acoustics, the concerto becomes a conversation — and you’re close enough to catch every smile.
We close with Symphony No. 40 in G minor, one of only two symphonies Mozart wrote in a minor key and a work that seems to glow from within. Composed in the astonishing summer of 1788, when he created his final three symphonies in quick succession, No. 40 blends urgency and elegance in equal measure. Its famous opening, with sighing figures that seem to press forward restlessly, feels almost confessional — a glimpse of private emotion shaped with impeccable craft. Mozart later revised the score to include clarinets, enriching the symphony’s color and deepening its warmth; in a hall like the Gunter, that timbral glow registers beautifully. The result is quintessential Mozart: intensity without heaviness, sophistication without distance, and a final movement that catches fire and never lets go.
Throughout the program, the Gunter Theatre’s 400‑seat intimacy turns detail into revelation — from the overture’s operatic tension, to the concerto’s lyrical “voice,” to the symphony’s luminous inner life. And with Joanna Mulfinger, one of Greenville’s own, at the center of the experience, this is Mozart at his most personal: brilliant, heartfelt, and right before your eyes.
