Two composers who began writing music before their teen years – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Felix Mendelssohn – will be featured when the Daytona Solisti Classical Players present their concert “Classical and Romantic Realms” on March 15.
Solisti and pianist Michael Rickman, the ensemble’s artist in residence, will perform “Classical and Romantic Realms” at 3 p.m. March 15 at Port Orange Presbyterian Church, 4662 S. Clyde Morris Blvd., Port Orange, where Solisti is in residence. Admission is a $15 requested donation.
The performance is the final one of Solisti’s 2026 Winter Music Festival. For more information on Daytona Solisti, go online at daytonasolisti.com.
Rickman will be featured on Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 12 in A Major, written in 1782 when the Austrian-born composer was 26.
Mozart was a child prodigy who began playing harpsichord, other keyboards and violin by age 5. Scholars debate whether he composed his first pieces at age 4 or 5. Mozart began performing publicly in Europe’s royal courts and other venues at age 6, and he wrote his first symphony at age 8.
Before his death in 1791 at age 35, Mozart had composed more than 600 symphonies, concertos, operas, choral pieces, masses, chamber music works and other compositions. Renowned 20th-century conductor Georg Solti praised Mozart’s genius by saying, “Mozart makes you believe in God because it cannot be by chance that such a phenomenon arrives into this world and leaves such an unbounded number of unparalleled masterpieces.”
Rickman is an internationally acclaimed pianist and Steinway Artist (an honor bestowed by the piano maker). He retired from Stetson University in April 2017 after 34 years as professor of piano at the DeLand school. During his storied career, he has performed in London, Paris, Carnegie Hall in New York City, Alice Tully Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and at numerous other venues worldwide.
The German newspaper Badische Zeitung-Freiburg described Rickman as “brilliant at the keyboard,” noting he “played not as a technician, but as a musician, who lived the performance with both body and soul.” New York Times critic Bernard Holland hailed Rickman as “a sure and steady pianist.”
Rickman has been named Professor Emeritus at Stetson as well as Daytona Solisti Artist in Residence. Rickman and violinist Susan Pitard Acree, founder of Daytona Solisti, have been collaborating musically for 19 years.
The Solisti Classical players will perform Mendelssohn’s String Symphony No. 2 in D Major, which is one of 12 string symphonies the German composer wrote from 1821 to 1823, when he was just 12 to 14 years old.
Mendelssohn’s “musical precocity, not just in composition but also conducting, piano and organ, violin and viola, was rivaled only by Mozart,” wrote R. Larry Todd in his 2003 biography, “Mendelssohn – A Life in Music.”
Mendelssohn’s 12 early string symphonies, which musicologists differentiate from his five “mature symphonies,” were performed only around the Mendelssohn home and were not published or publicly performed until long after his death in 1847.
Mendelssohn, who is considered part of the early Romantic period, “was a prodigious polymath/polyglot whose intellectual horizons – embracing music, drawing, painting, poetry, classical studies and theology – were second to none among the ‘great’ composers,” Todd wrote.
The program for “Classical and Romantic Realms” also will include Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “The Lark Ascending,” featuring violinist Paulo Torres. Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso” featuring violinist Olga Kolpakova, and Max Bruch’s “Kol Nidrei,” featuring violist Angelo Goderre.
Acree founded Daytona Solisti in 2005 after she moved to Daytona Beach from Atlanta. She previously played violin in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra for 22 years, performing in New York’s Carnegie Hall, London, Chicago, Paris and other cities.
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