Notes from the mozart and well beyond CD booklet:

Embellishment

Although some scholars and performers question whether or not soloists should embellish repetitions of phrases in Mozart’s works, the composer himself has left evidence, particularly apt for K.191, that the general practice of embellishing was at least allowable if not in fact common in his day.

A particular phrase for the solo bassoon in the Andante ma Adagio of K.191 m.9-10 is repeated verbatim in the source material later in the movement m.32-33. This same phrase is also given twice in the solo vocal line of Mozart’s aria «Ah se a morir mi chiama» from his opera Lucio Silla (K.135/xiv) composed two years earlier. Mozart’s borrowing of his own material would not normally be of much interest, except that in this case, he later prepared an extensively embellished version of the aria’s vocal line in which the repetition of the phrase in question was quite significantly elaborated.

A further example is found in an embellished version Mozart made (K.293e) of the solo vocal line of J. C. Bach’s «Cara, la dolce fiamma» from his opera Adriano in Siria. In Bach’s original aria and Mozart’s Andante ma Adagio, there are similar sequential passages m.34-36 in which a phrase is heard plainly once, and then immediately twice more somewhat lower and altered in harmony, but otherwise the same. In Mozart’s later version of Bach’s aria, each repetition in the sequence is embellished in increasingly virtuosic style.

The present recording adopts these two examples of Mozart’s embellishing style, following his later version of «Ah se a morir mi chiama» exactly for the repetition of the borrowed phrase, and paraphrasing his version of Bach’s «Cara, la dolce fiamma» for the sequential passage.

© 2004 Michael Sweeney