GMCD 7181 You can order this CD in our E-Shop under Orchestral Music ***Sound Clips***	WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART(1756-1791) Sinfonia Concertante in E flat for Violin, Viola and Orchestra Soloists Richard Studt & Nodar Jvania Concerto in A for Bassett Clarinet and Orchestra Soloist Joan Enric Lluna Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra Soloist Andrew Knights with The Bournemouth Sinfonietta directed by Richard Studt

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DDD Total Time = 79:40 Recorded: St Peter’s Church, Parkstone, Poole, Dorset, 14 & 15 September 1998.

In August 1777, after five increasingly frustrating years as a violinist in the court orchestra of Archbishop von Colloredo, ruler of the Principality of Salzburg, Mozart was dismissed. Accompanied by his mother he set off in search of a post more suited to his talents and on 30^th October arrived in Mannheim. It soon became obvious that there was no suitable employment to be found there but it took a stern letter from his father, who had stayed behind in Salzburg, to persuade him to move on and try his luck in Paris. Mozart’s reluctance to leave Mannheim was more personal than musical; he had fallen in love with17-year-old Aloisia Weber. Angered and upset at having been forced to tear himself away from his new love, Mozart’s misery was compounded by his inability to find anything but the most humble organist’s post in Paris and by the death of his mother after just three months in the city. Clearly his dreams of a future away from Salzburg were shattered and when his father wrote to say that Colloredo was willing to reinstate him as Concert Master to the Court Orchestra and Court Organist he realised his only option was to return there. The long, lonely journey back was made all the more miserable by the fact that when he called in to visit the Webers he found Aloisia no longer interested in him.

Mozart had been particularly Impressed by the orchestra he had heard in Mannheim. Unlike the mediocre talents of so many of the Salzburg musicians, members of the Mannheim orchestra were each virtuosi in their own right and frequently performed concertante works with two or more of them taking solo roles. On his return to Salzburg in early 1779 Mozart set to work writing a concertante work of his own. The exact circumstances of the first performance of his Sinfonia Concertante are not known, but it seems probable it was first performed in Salzburg towards the end of 1779 with Mozart’s deputy concert master, Antonio Brunetti, and Joseph Hafeneder as the soloists. To project it above the orchestral violas Mozart writes the solo viola part scordatura - sounding a tone above normal. The profound andante, framed between two openly cheerful movements (the first opening with a dotted rhythm typical of the Mannheim concertante works) seems to reflect Mozart’s sorrow at the death of his mother, his lost love and his shattered dreams.

Mozart’s second sojourn in the Salzburg orchestra was somewhat shorter than his first and finished in even more acrimonious circumstances; on 8^th June 1781 he was literally kicked out of the archbishop’s office. He went to stay with his old friends the Webers, who had by then moved to Vienna. Aloisia had married the previous October so Mozart turned his attentions to their third daughter, Constanze, whom he married a year later. Mozart lived in Vienna for the rest of his life and it was there, on 14^th December 1784, that he became a freemason. A fellow mason was the clarinettist Anton Stadler who had used the masonic connection to borrow money from Mozart; which he never repaid. Nevertheless Mozart had considerable respect for Stadler and was particularly impressed by his ability to produce an unusually powerful tone from the very lowest register of the clarinet. Stadler had developed a modified instrument – the "basset-clarinet" - which could reach down four semitones below the conventional clarinet. It was for this instrument that Mozart wrote his last orchestral work, the Concerto in A. He completed the Concerto in October 1791, just a month before his death, and almost certainly never heard it performed; nor did he make or sanction the arrangement of the concerto for standard clarinet, in which form it has become universally known and loved ever since. Stadler himself performed the concerto widely after Mozart’s death and in 1794 performed it in the Latvian capital, Riga. In 1993 a musicologist discovered a printed programme for that concert which included an engraving of Stadler’s basset-clarinet. It was shown to have a bulbous bell-shaped ending fixed at right-angles to the main body of the instrument. Although the first 199 bars of the first movement survive in Mozart’s original manuscript, the remainder of the concerto has had to be reconstructed from contemporary reports of Stadler’s performances and a certain amount of intelligent guess-work.

Although Mozart was mostly contemptuous of his fellow-musicians in Colloredo’s employ, the orchestra had a high enough reputation to attract eminent musicians from other parts of Europe, and especially from Italy. On 1^st April 1777 the Italian oboist Giuseppe Feriendis arrived in Salzburg to perform with the orchestra. Mozart wrote his C major Oboe Concerto for him but it was another oboist, Friedrich Ramm, who became most associated with the work during Mozart’s lifetime. During Mozart’s stay in Mannheim Ramm performed it no less than five times. After the last of these occasions Mozart wrote to his father that "Yesterday [14^th February] Herr Ramm (by way of a change) played for the fifth time my oboe concerto…..which is making a great sensation here. It is now Ramm’s cheval de bataille". The same day Ferdinand Dejean, an amateur Dutch flautist (who was actually a surgeon with the Dutch East India Company), gave Mozart 96 florins for "three short concertos and two quartets" he had commissioned from the composer. Among these was a Flute Concerto in D which was, to all intents and purposes, identical to the Oboe Concerto. It seems likely that in order to fulfil Dejean’s commission Mozart had merely transcribed his Oboe Concerto for flute, although since both manuscripts have been lost their true origins remain a matter for conjecture.

Page revised 30.06.03