The Sinfonia Concertante by Mozart is in part about an extraordinary abundance of ideas and sonorities which pour out with a seeming effortlessness, like ripened fruit simply there to be picked.
The opening orchestral exposition makes this clear, as one idea is laid out on top of another until, with a half dozen in the air, one loses track. And more are yet to come as the curtain opens and the soloists enter in one of the most sublime passages of all Mozart, soaring out from the background on a sustained high E-flat.
Beyond these instrumental dimensions, there’s yet another. This is the world of opera, of lamenting song, with a hint of baroque sentiment, which comes to us in the sensitive and lengthy Andante, one of Mozart’s relatively rare minor-mode slow movements. Here we find an emotional depth that, as Maynard Solomon speculates in his notable biography, may reflect the composer’s experience of loss in coping with the recent death of his mother.
With the presto rondo finale, a joyful spirit returns. As Alfred Einstein observes, its “gaiety results principally from the fact that in the chain of musical events the unexpected always occurs first, being followed by the expected.”
Here are Julia Fischer, violin, and Gordon Nikolic, Viola, to perform this great music for you:
