Happy birthday to Mozart! Born January 27th 1756, he’d be about 259 years old today! To celebrate the special day of this remarkable composer, we invited violinist David Park and pianist Larry Gee to share with us some Mozart selections for violin and piano. 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. At the age of 5, he composed and performed before European royalty. At 17, he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg, Austria. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position and chose to stay in the capital, where he spent his final years composing many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of his death. The circumstances of his early death have been much mythologized and portrayed in print and on screen. 

He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, chamber, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers, and his influence on subsequent Western art music is nearly unmatched. Joseph Haydn wrote that "posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years." 

As for tonight’s performers, David H Park started playing violin at the age of 5 in Seoul, Korea. He received his Bachelor of Music at the University of Indiana and his Master of Music at the Julliard School, is currently the Assistant Concertmaster of the Utah Symphony and teaches at the University of Utah. He recently held a starring role in Kenny Riches’ film The Strongest Man, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival this year. 

Larry Gee is a longtime guest of the show, and one of our very favorites! This episode marked his 15th time accompanying and soloing for Highway 89. Larry graduated with a Bachelor of Music in piano accompanying and a Master of Music in piano performance from Indiana University. He was a master class accompanist for the late violinist Franco Gull at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, Italy and a staff accompa