Was Mozart a utopian? Measured by his close links to the freemasons in Vienna, he shared the visionary humanitarian and Enlightenment ideals of his time, including the then growing criticism of social injustice, of the church and the aristocracy. Tonight the Symphoniker Hamburg devotes an entire concert to this music that is often unfairly trivialised, but is actually full of profundity and subtlety. The orchestra has chosen two brilliant soloists in the shape of Elena Bashkirova and Denis Kozhukhin: Kozhukhin once studied with Bashkirova’s father Dmitri, and the two of them got to know each other better at the Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival among other places, of which Bashkirova is curator. read less