Mozart's "Gran Partita"

I yesterday finally got around to auditioning my newly acquired CD of Mozart's seven-movement B-flat-major Serenade (K.361, "Gran Partita") with a 13-member wind band cum string bass drawn from the Berliner Philharmoniker, Zubin Mehta(!) conducting.

I'm somewhat ashamed to confess I first became aware of the existence of this work courtesy of the film version of Amadeus wherein was heard part of the meltingly beautiful third-movement Adagio (at the point in the film when we first meet Mozart as musician) which, in the film, came to such a horrific, jarringly wrong close musically that I simply couldn't believe Mozart actually wrote it that way; ergo, my acquisition of the CD of the full seven-movement Serenade.

Turns out, of course, that Mozart didn't write it that way. What Sir Neville Marriner (Amadeus's music director) did for the film was to take the close of the seventh movement Molto Allegro Finale of the Serenade, and tack it onto the third-movement Adagio to serve as its close. Whatever possessed Sir Neville to perpetrate such an idiot and grotesque edit is simply beyond my meager capacity to imagine, but, to quote the film's Emperor Joseph II, "There it is."

The performance of this superb, supremely beautiful, and highly unusual work (the only one of its kind Mozart ever wrote) on the above identified and linked CD is positively brilliant if, for the most part, a bit grim-faced, and despite a persistently upper-middle-register-flat basset horn (I've never seen the score for this work, nor have I ever heard the clarinet-like-sounding basset horn played alone, and so am merely conjecturing that the basset horn is the culprit here, not the clarinet) is a performance I heartily recommend. For those of you who, like me, are devoted fans of the film version of Amadeus it will, at very least, act as reassuringly corrective of Sir Neville's ill-considered and loathsome music edit.