Is there a better upbeat curtain-raiser than Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro Overture? Clocking in at just five minutes, the mood is set for this naughty bedroom farce of class straight away. Being chucked out of the priesthood for adultery, and as a close friend of Casanova’s, the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte was surely well-qualified to deal with the mad comings and goings of the opera’s plot.

Lang Lang, Kirill Karabits and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Photo © Laura Manariti

The style of playing adopted by conductor Kirill Karabits for this performance was not your lean and mean ACO approach, but a more old-fashioned style, which left room for some elegance.

Written at the same time as Figaro but never published in his lifetime, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 24, K.491 is one of only two in a minor key. Once again, the opening bars lure you into a tone of impending terror, though it is more a character of sorrowfulness that pervades the rest of the concerto. In the original manuscript of this despairing music, Mozart, true to form, still managed to draw some funny faces over what was probably a botched ‘repeat...