Mozart Concerto for Basset Clarinet

Violin I

Eugene Kim, Concertmaster
Sharon Bartley
David Engel
Dawn Levy
Jessica Milli

Violin II

Rachel Lane, Principal
Wendy Chun
Richard Hong
Sachi Rosenbaum
Seiichi Takedai

Viola

Michael Garrahan, Principal
Stephen Fisher
Ashley Reinhart

Cello

Debra Anker, Principal
Ethan Butler
Philip Hopko

Bass

Dale Houck, Principal

Flute

Eric Abalahin
Colleen Darkow

Oboe

Susan Herlick
Jane Hughes

Clarinet

Susan Sandler

Basset Clarinet

Zac West

Bassoon

Katrien van Dijk
Bill Jokela

Horn

Jim McIntyre
Bruce McWhirter

Trumpet

Chris Erbe
Bruce Stanly

Timpani

James Adams

Stage Managers

Debra Anker
Ethan Butler
Katrien van Dijk

Elizabeth Bley is a Vandoren Artist-Clinician and is the Principal Clarinetist with The Loudoun Symphony Orchestra. She maintains a large private studio (teaching 34 students per week) and works throughout Northern Virginia as an adjudicator, clinician, master class instructor, clarinet sectional coach, and freelance musician. Ms. Bley is the editor of clarinet music for the Virginia Band & Orchestra Directors Association, grading and maintaining a database of over 4,000 solo and ensemble works for clarinet. She has performed many times as a soloist at the Bruges Conservatory in Belgium, where she received a Clarinetissimo Talent Award for her “outstanding performances and high artistic level.” [read more]

Now in his seventeenth season with the Washington Sinfonietta,  acclaimed by the Washington Post as “…one of Washington’s premier conductors of both old and new music…”, Joel Lazar was Music Director of the JCC Symphony Orchestra from 1988 through 2008 and has continued with that orchestra in its new identity as the Symphony of the Potomac. He conducted the Theater Chamber Players in engagements at the Kennedy Center, the Library of Congress and on tour from 1986 to 2003, and has appeared as guest conductor with many orchestras and contemporary music ensembles in the Washington area. [read more]

The attractive Minuet in C, K. 409, presents a set of minor Mozartean mysteries. While Mozart wrote sets of minuets, contradances and German dances, usually in groups of three, six, or twelve, to serve as dance music, this individual work stands inexplicably by itself. Moreover, it calls for a relatively large orchestra, flutes, oboes, bassoons, horns and trumpets in pairs, timpani, and full strings, unlike his utilitarian dance music which uses significantly smaller groups. It is texturally rich as well as expansive, thematic material developed by imitation in the main section, and virtuoso solos for flute and oboe in the contrasting Trio.

Two historical notions have been adduced to suggest that it was intended as a supplementary movement to his three-movement Symphony No. 34, K. 338, written in 1780 for Salzburg. Mozart had moved to Vienna in 1781, and we are told that this symphony was performed in May 1782 at one of his first concerts there. It has been assumed that since the Vienna public preferred four-movement symphonies Mozart composed K. 409 to complement the pre-existing three movements of K. 338.

Indeed, any number of distinguished conductors of our own time have accepted this thesis and perform a composite version, suggestive to me of the hybrid Mahler First Symphony which presents the lovely “Blumine” movement from the work’s earliest versions as an interpolation in the final, published form, with—to my mind, dubious effect.

I was delighted to find that my Harvard classmate Neal Zaslaw, one of the leading Mozart scholars of our time, in his magisterial 1989 study Mozart’s Symphonies: Context, Performance Practice, Reception summarizes the evidence against K. 409 as an addendum to K. 338, as follows: “The notion promulgated that the C major symphonic Minuet K. 409 was written to be added to K. 338 is improbable. [It] is too long to fit the proportions of K. 338 and calls for a pair of flutes not found in it. [Some scholars] suggest that Mozart could have added flutes to the first and last movements of K. 338, as he did to the Viennese version of K. 385 [the”Haffner” Symphony] but there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that he actually did so. From its large scoring, length, and the presence of violas, [K. 409] must have been intended as a concert piece and not as dance music.”

* * *

Mozart wrote twenty-three original concerti for one, two and three pianos between 1773 and 1791, the year of his death. An earlier group of four from 1767 and 1772 consists of arrangements with small orchestra of piano sonata movements by minor composers of his time; Hermann Friedrich Raupach (1728-78), Leontzi Honauer (ca.1730-ca.1790), Johann Schobert (ca.1735-1767) and Johann Gottfried Eckard (1735-1809) and by his celebrated older colleagues, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-88) and Johann Christian Bach (1735-82). Most striking, he wrote fifteen concerti between 1782, the year after he moved to Vienna and 1786, amidst constant activity as a performer as well as the creation of a number of other major works. A celebrated virtuoso, the close interaction between composition and performance is most evident in this group of concerti.  

Completed in February 1788, the “Coronation” Concerto takes its name from Mozart’s  performances at the Saxon court in Dresden, in April 1789 and again in Frankfurt at the celebrations surrounding the coronation of Leopold II in October 1790. The surviving solo part is even by Mozart’s standards sparsely notated, requiring significant elaboration by the modern soloist, which this evening’s guest provides with ample imagination, skill, and taste. Mozart left no cadenzas for K. 537, Alon Goldstein will perform his own in the finale and one by the eminent German scholar and keyboard virtuoso Andreas Staier in the first movement.

In his admirable 1998 volume of essays The Concerto: A listener’s guide, drawn from years of writing for the Boston Symphony and San Francisco Symphony, Michael Steinberg tells us that for much of the nineteenth century and the earlier years of the twentieth, this concerto was played virtually to the exclusion of all of Mozart’s others.  Only gradually have a few more concerti crept into the concert repertoire, although complete sets have been recorded many times over, some with the soloist conducting from the keyboard, some on modern instruments and some on replicas of or actual instruments of Mozart’s day.

Perhaps in reaction to the earlier popularity of K. 537, many modern critics and scholars have tended to undervalue it. Steinberg objects to this and points out that it is only relatively recently with the increased interest in historically influenced performance practice that pianists have permitted themselves the freedom to embellish and enrich the skeletal text which has been carried down to us through several generations of editions.

While the work itself is not as complex in structure or texture as others, more favored among Mozart’s piano concerti, but like anything by this master, repays close listening and study. Seemingly symmetrical repetitions of thematic material are often subtly altered upon recurrence, straightforward harmonic and melodic movement is frequently subverted by unexpected chromaticism, turns of tonality or mode, and members of the relatively small wind section frequently step out of the background as soloists or in duets and trios.

The first movement has the conventional layout of orchestral tuttis alternating with solo episodes, the second movement is in fact a “Romanza”, a genre well-known from Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik”, and the finale is one of several in which the composer uses the characteristic rhythm of the gavotte, typically starting on an upbeat and slightly ambiguous in its relationship to the bar-line until its first phrase ends.

* * * 

The E-flat Major Concerto, K. 482 is the first of three, along with the A-Major Concerto, K. 488, and the C-Minor Concerto, K. 491, composed while Mozart was at work on The Marriage of Figaro, during the last months of 1785 and the early part of 1786. It is generally considered to be the longest of his piano concerti, typically lasting slightly more than a half hour.

“The anthropomorphic qualities of Mozart’s solo concertos invite comparisons with his operatic and concert arias. Both domains demonstrate Mozart’s genius in character portrayal while reconciling virtuosity with the needs of dramatic expression; both deploy prodigious melodic invention, a fluid rhythmic language and a voluptuous orchestra fabric. The debt of Mozart’s concertos to his solo vocal music is revealed by many rhetorical details—for example, the recitative-like passages in the slow movements of many piano concertos. The variety of accompaniment patterns in the orchestra—as many as three within a single phrase—and the vivacity with which the ensemble responds to and provokes the soloist, parallels the use of the orchestra in arias and accompanied recitatives as alter ego of the soloist….It is the concertos (and operas), not the symphonies, that reveal the evolution of Mozart’s orchestral writing in the Vienna years. The emancipation of the winds [is] central to the development of his piano concertos…From this point on Mozart elevates the wind band to a privileged entity within the orchestra…This transformation of the orchestral texture does not manifest itself in the symphonies until the Prague, K. 504 (1786).” (Robert Levin, “Concertos” in H.C. Robbins Landon, ed. The Mozart Compendium, 1990)

While the first movement of our concerto is structurally unremarkable, the second and third movements have unusual features predicated on the composer’s unusually rich and “emancipated” wind scoring, in this instance the autonomy of the core sextet of clarinets, bassoons and horns who play by themselves, supported by low strings, not only in one episode of the slow movement but also in another interlude in the finale. In a second episode of the slow movement, flute and bassoon engage in a florid dialogue, accompanied by strings. It is as if the Harmoniemusik ensemble of one of Mozart’s great wind serenades lurks constantly in the wings, eager to come on stage for a chance to show its prowess. The winds function as a corps of soloists, interacting with and alternating with the keyboard player.

We assume that the composer elaborated the surviving written solo part in performance, some of which is clearly left in a kind of shorthand. As none by the composer survive, Alon Goldstein performs his own cadenzas, as well as other elaborations and transitional flourishes.

Notes by Joel Lazar ©2024

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