By Kwon Mee-yooPianist Cho Seong-jin will premiere an unheard piece by Mozart in Salzburg on the occasion of the classical composer's 265th birthday.Cho will play Mozart's Allegro in D K626b/16 at the Great Hall of the Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation, Wednesday, which mark's the Austrian composer's birthday as well as the opening date of the first-ever virtual edition of Mozartwoche, or Mozart Week, festival."It is a great honor to be invited to give the premiere of a formerly unknown work by Mozart in the city of Salzburg, where the composer was born," Cho wrote on Twitter, Friday.Rolando Villazon, a Mexican-born French tenor who serves as artistic director of Mozartwoche, invited Cho to the online festival, which presents Mozart's works in 10 concerts, featuring some of the world's best Mozart interpreters."The world premiere of the Allegro in D is the icing on the birthday cake for our beloved Mozart. I am thrilled it will be presented by the outstanding pianist Seong-jin Cho, who has such a marvelous feeling for the tender humanity of Mozart's melodies. Mozart's music brings us solace in difficult times and is the shining light that lets us look forward to the time when audiences and performers will be able to meet again. For now, we have the chance to share the Mozartwoche experience online and witness a special moment in music history with this world premiere," Villazon said in a statement. The 94-second-long piano piece was discovered in 2018. Preserved on both sides of a single manuscript sheet in Mozart's handwriting, the piece is estimated to date back to early 1773, when the composer was 17, written during his third tour of Italy or soon after returning home to Salzburg.The score is believed to have been in the estate of the composer's youngest son, before going into the collection of Austrian civil servant and amateur musician Aloys Fuchs. Then it was put up for auction in 1899 when an antique book dealer who owned it in the late 19th century passed away. The Allegro in D appeared in Austrian musicologist Kochel's catalogue of Mozart's works, but the work eluded scholars despite having been presented at auction several times between 1900 and 1928.The Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation purchased the manuscript from the family of its previous owner, a French-Dutch engineer who had acquired the manuscript from a dealer in Paris in the late 1920s. The foundation had the score examined by its staff and outside experts and confirmed that the unattributed piano piece was undeniably by Mozart.The performance will be streamed on Deutsche Grammophon's DG Stage with a short version available on DG's YouTube channel.The label will also release "Ninety-Four Seconds of New Mozart," a recording of the "brief yet profoundly moving keyboard piece" played by Cho, Jan. 29.

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