"Mozart wrote some beautiful little sonatas when he was six or eight and they are very sweet, but when he gets into his teens the music has much more maturity. While many of the featured composers started penning music while very young, Collins admits it was usually when they hit their teens that their compositions began to acquire real depth “When they hit 13 or 14, the music develops and at 16 it definitely gets more substantial, but it is extraordinary what they were doing when you think back to our teens and being spotty adolescents. "Pieces like that got me thinking, 'Could I build a weekend around the theme, could I come up with enough pieces from different composers to make it interesting?' So I worked a bit at it and came up with this programme it’s a great celebration of youth.” 'It is extraordinary what they were doing when you think back to our teens and being spotty adolescents' It’s a short song but it has incredible intensity and maturity and I always find it absolutely astonishing that he was only 16 when he wrote it. I have performed some of the works for example there is a song by Schubert, ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, which is being done and it is such a mature work. For many years I have been astonished by the output of many of the more precocious composers. "Once you walk in the door of the Town Hall on Friday night you’ll know that every single note you will hear performed will have been composed by a teenage composer, and some pieces were even written in pre-teenage years. “Rather than just having something like a Beethoven or Schubert festival, I think it is nice to have a more specific theme that links music from different periods together and I thought prodigies would make a lovely showcase for a weekend. “One of the challenges and one of the joys of being artistic director of Music for Galway is that it is my job to come up with an interesting theme for the midwinter festival,” Finghin Collins tells me as he explains the inspiration behind this year’s programme. The festival runs at the Town Hall Theatre from Friday January 20 to 22, and features soprano Ailish Tynan, pianist Christian Chamorel, the Conte3mpo and Esposito quartets, and the aforementioned Alma, an 11-year-old pianiast, violinnist, and composer. "I love Mozart very much, he's probably my favourite composer, but I don't really like it when people call me 'Little Miss Mozart' because I don't like being called 'little', I'm very big, and secondly, if I just wrote everything Mozart wrote again it would be boring.PRODIGY, THIS year’s Music for Galway midwinter festival, will feature amazing music by brilliant prodigies from history like Mozart, Mendelssohn, Mahler, and Prokofiev, as well as present-day wunderkind Alma Deutscher, who will be making her Irish debut. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, probably the world's most famous child prodigy, began composing aged five and was also 11 when he wrote his first opera.īut Alma Deutscher says she does not want to be known as another Mozart. 'I don't like being called little'Ĭomparisons with Mozart are inevitable.
The couple, realising their young daughter's prodigious talent, moved the family to Surrey to be closer to the Yehudi Menuhin School in Cobham, where Alma takes piano and violin lessons.
Her father, Guy Deutscher, is an internationally renowned linguist and amateur flautist, while her mother Janie was an organ scholar at Oxford. "For example, a few days ago when I was in bed resting in the middle of the night then I got this beautiful melody."Īlma was able to pick out the notes on a piano at age two and at age three her parents gave her her first violin. "But when I am resting or even in bed or skipping with my rope, then melodies stream into my head.
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