What a relief it is to spend an hour or so in the presence of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart after seeing Peter Shaffer’s fictionalised retelling of the composer’s life earlier this year.

Presented as part of the Blackheath Chamber Music Festival, With Love, Amadeus is the real deal, and we have actor John Bell and pianist Simon Tedeschi to thank for it.

Simon Tedeschi and John Bell at the 2023 Blackheath Chamber Music Festival. Photo © Keith Saunders

The freewheeling approach of these two living national treasures belies the careful construction of a performance, in which they take turns charting Mozart’s life from childhood to his success at 18 in Munich with the opera La finta giardiniera, his frustrations in Salzburg, and eventually his falling in love with Constanze Weber. Tedeschi occasionally accompanies Bell’s narration, and this underscoring makes Mozart’s decline into poverty and ill health even more poignant.

We are given a taste of the precocious child aware of his superiority; the son who misses his mother and so admires his father; the brother playfully winding up his sister, whom he nicknames Nannerl; the amorous young lover infatuated with his wife-to-be,...