Mozart: Rarities & Surprises　莫扎特：珍品与惊喜 / Mozart: Complete Edition Box 17: Theatre & Ballet Music / 莫扎特全集第十七盒：戏剧和芭蕾音乐、珍品、惊喜

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艺人
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
语种
其他
厂牌
Philips Classics
发行时间
1990年10月12日
专辑类别
录音室专辑

专辑介绍

This last box in the Mozart Complete Edition, labelled &Rarities and Surprises&, contains two CDs that are reissues (so not perhaps truly surprises) and one of largely unfamiliar fare. The first CD corresponds with &The Eight-Year-Old Mozart in Chelsea& (6500 367, 1 0/72—nla), which consists of transcriptions of pieces from Mozart's London Notebook, taken to have been compiled during the time the family spent in the pretty rural village of Chelsea for the sake of Leopold's health (they spent much the largest part of their 15 months in Britain in Soho). These pieces come down to us on two staves, as if composed for the keyboard, and some of them were indeed probably intended as harpsichord music; but Erik Smith, Philips's devoted and indefatigable resident Mozartian, has rightly observed that several 93 of them look like orchestral or perhaps chamber music in their textures and ideas, and further that certain of the movements patently belong together as miniature sonatas, divertimentos or what have you. Some of them come off very well; but I have to say that many of them are orchestrated in a style very remote from Mozart's or that of his time—and I rather think that Mr Smith, were he to reset them now, would be more restrained in some respects and perhaps also a bit more historically imaginative in the devising of accompaniment figures in particular. Well, I don't want to make heavy weather of these childish pieces; I am grateful to have them in any form, and although you won't want to hear them too often there are several that hint at the true Mozartian spark—the little G minor group, for example, and three of four that faintly anticipate later and greater things (some movements from Les petits riens, for example). The playing is as skilled as you would expect from Neville Marriner and his Academy.

Second is the disc of wind arrangements of Don Giovanni and Die Entführung. These first appeared 16 years ago (6500 661, 1/75—nla), and others have recorded them since. Such arrangements were made routinely in the Vienna of Mozart's day so that bands could play the favourite tunes from the latest shows. Mozart himself had intended to make an Entführung arrangement but was too busy (composing the Haffner Symphony and getting married), and—although it has been suggested recently that one of the surviving versions is his—there is little reason to think in the event he did so. The present version, to my ears, is not very effective in its handling of the instruments or in the ways the cuts are made. The Don Giovanni one, however, the work of an old hand in wind arrangements, is excellent and often quite entertaining, and the playing here is first-rate, both lively and musicianly. I found it very enjoyable, though still don't quite grasp why, except to enlarge our understanding of how things were done in Mozart's day, anyone would really want to listen to this rather than to one of the numerous and admirable recordings of the opera in the form in which it was composed: that is, with voices. It really is better that way. Well, this version does, I suppose, make very agreeable background music.

The third disc begins with something new, or rather something rediscovered. Mozart composed a detached rondo for horn and orchestra, but left the scoring in sketchy form; there have been a number of completions, and some have been recorded. The form of the piece has always seemed a bit puzzling, but no one apparently had realized that the surviving sketch was incomplete until a year or so ago, when a whole bifolium, four sides of manuscript, containing 60 bars, was discovered. It is now owned by a generous American collector who has loaned it to a public collection and permitted it to be transcribed. With these 60 bars duly replaced, the piece is restored to its original, much more logical structure (previously there was what is now clearly seen as a 'recapitulation', of material that hadn't ever been heard first time, as it were). It still isn't quite clear what Mozart intended, because the orchestral parts are very incomplete, and sometimes what is clearly the main line of the music is missing. Erik Smith has made an excellent attempt at it, musical and sensible; every Mozart scholar will say of one passage or another that he would have done differently, but this version is, I think, as good as any we are likely to get. Timothy Brown plays the solo horn part with spirit and cool skill.

The wind quintet is a different matter. This came to light last year, though its existence was known before and recorded in Köchel. I saw the manuscript before it was auctioned at Sotheby's. It is a 35-bar fragment, clearly intended as a slow introduction, and almost certainly composed in 1783 or perhaps 1784; one can see it as a step towards the Piano and Wind Quintet K452 of spring 1784. It isn't frankly, very interesting as music, lacking the force and the pregnant air of the K452 introduction, and it is not hard to see why Mozart abandoned it. It is 'completed' here as regards the scoring and some of the detail, but it 94 was a musical solecism to leave the bare piano fourths in bar 11—harmonically unthinkable, and in any case contradicted in the repeated passage; a bassoon E fiat is needed—and also to elaborate first time a piano phrase that is later decorated by the oboe. Then come a couple of pleasing contredanses that survive only as melodies, given the expert Smith treatment. The two Tantum ergo settings are generally thought not to be authentic, as the attributions are late and unsupported; I'd be a shade surprised if K197 turned out to be Mozart's, rather less so if the attractive K142 did. The modulating keyboard prelude is quite a recent find.

The aria K490 is most welcome in this form. This is a piece Mozart wrote in 1786 for the Vienna concert performance of Idomeneo in which Idamante was sung not by a castrato but by a tenor; there are adjustments in the score to make the ensembles work with one voice sometimes an octave lower. Mozart also added a new aria for Idamante, this large Rondo with obbligato violin, which when performed within the opera seems dramatically rather static and out of place. The curious thing is that Mozart notated it not in the tenor clef and in tenor pitch, as he invariably did when writing for the tenor, but in soprano clef and at soprano pitch. The simple explanation, that he made a mistake, doesn't really wash: Mozart didn't make that sort of mistake—he was hearing every note as he was writing it. Anyway, the aria does sound particularly well with a soprano (which is another reason for suspecting that Mozart may truly have intended it for one) and it is sung here with considerable passion by Susanne Mentzer, with the violin part sweetly and skilfully done by Andreas ROhn. After the dullish little march that Mozart dropped from Die Entführung, we have a rather odd final track. Mozart is thought, like several other composers of the time, to have written a musical dice-game, to enable amateurs to write minuets or other dances by throwing a dice (it's very simple: a series of interchangeable cliches on a fixed harmonic pattern in the bass, and the throw dictates which phrase is used, bar by bar). Here it is demonstrated by Erik Smith and Sir Neville Marriner; they play the game in what sounds like a Viennese Stube, as if they might be Da Ponte and Sussmayr (or so they say at the start; later it's Da Ponte and Schikaneder), and after some conversation and dice-throwing the resulting pieces are heard, for what they are worth.

Philips certainly deserve our gratitude for this valuable series with its interesting oddments. They have covered virtually everything, and in performances of a generally very high standard; just a few oddments are missing, such as revisions and arrangements, alternative cadenzas, and one symphony seems to have escaped, K74g, which is not of proven authenticity but has precisely the same claims philologically and probably stronger ones musically than several others that are included. This last box contains nothing of primary importance but several items that are nevertheless worthwhile and I imagine that collectors won't want to miss it.

-- Stanley Sadie, Gramophone [12/1991]

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