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Notes from the mozart
and well beyond CD booklet:
Instrumentation
The performance of Mozart’s
K.191 presented here draws on recent scholarship not in order to
claim historical authenticity, but for interpretive guidance and
inspiration. For example, the instrumentation used for this recording
synthesizes four separate areas of scholarly inquiry into Mozart’s
works for solo instrument(s)
and orchestra.
First, it has been proposed that
the string ripieno parts (which are at rest whenever the
soloist is playing) included in sets of complete performance materials
for some
of Mozart’s concertos presented in Vienna, prove
that fewer players accompanied the soloist than played in the purely
orchestral passages. Secondly, iconographic evidence suggests that
Mozart’s concertos presented in Salzburg may have occasionally
been performed using only one orchestral player per part throughout.
Scholars have elsewhere suggested that the bass rather than the
cello was the primary instrument for the single Basso e violoncello
line for concertos performed in Salzburg. And finally, it has been
observed that in nearly all of his concerto
movements calling for muted violin accompaniment composed
after K.191, Mozart indicates that flutes should play in place of
oboes, presumably for the superior blend with muted strings.
The present recording combines these
theories and reduces the full complement of strings used in the
orchestral passages (5 first violins, 5 second violins, 2 violas,
and 1 cello and 1 bass together), to just one player per part when
the solo bassoon is playing (first violin, second violin, viola,
and bass), and employs flutes instead of oboes with the muted violins
and violas that Mozart specifies in the Andante ma Adagio.
This fusing of performance traditions
and orchestrational innovations from different periods of Mozart’s
life preserves the presumed intimacy and clarity of concerto performances
in Salzburg (somewhat akin to chamber music), and the grandeur of
later large-scale performances of concertos in Vienna.
©
2004 Michael Sweeney
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