Fanfare Reviews
from January/February 1992

Reviews: Mozart

MOZART: Serenade No. 10 in B-Flat for Twelve Wind instruments and Double Bass, K. 361 ("Gran Partita"). Jane Glover conducting the London Mozart Players Wind Ensemble. ASV CD DCA 770 [DDD]; 68:36. Produced by Mark Brown. (Distributed by Harmonia Mundi USA.)

MOZART: Serenade No. 10 in B-Flat for Twelve Wind Instruments and Double Bass, K. 361 ("Gran Partita"). A Musical Joke, K. 522. Gunther Schuller conducting the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. ARABESQUE 26617 [DDD]; 69:58. Produced by Jeral Benjamin.

Two more well-founded accounts of the "Gran Partita" join a dozen or so already on CD, clamoring for the attention of initiates. Despite the geographical distribution here, interpretive approaches converge markedly upon brisk tempos, securely internalized rhythmic emphases, and satisfying chordal balance. Jane Glover and her Londoners enjoy the benefits of a production making unusually appropriate use of CD potential: alternate takes of both minuets are supplied, so that one may choose to hear these movements with all their repeats, or, without taking special programming pains, have their more conventional partially repeated forms.

As for the rest, composers, no matter how they compose or what, seem to have a level of insight and of textural control denied to other kinds of musicians when they come to the podium. Gunther Schuller is no exception. He puts his expert New York players through their paces with vigor and poise, plumbing particular depths of feeling in the Adagio and Romanza. ASV and Arabesque share aural tastes in engineering, offering plenty of air but no conspicuous excess of resonance around the ensemble.

I'm ambivalent about counting as an asset another performance of the Musical Joke, however deftly negotiated it may be--and Schuller's is deft indeed--for Mozart's exorcism in satire of his father's style doesn't bear repetition well. Both CDs join a select group of modern-instrument performances which maintain the highest technical level and show no signs of flagging in the stretch. It is really not productive to try to rate them further, against each other or against recordings by Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, by the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields under Marriner, by a Marlboro group under Marcel Moyse, or by several period-instrument lots led by Octophorus. Any one of these discs offers worthy representation of the music, and the more of them one has and hears, the more illuminating each one becomes. Both CDs earn strongest recommendation.

John Wiser

Copyright © 1992 by Fanfare, Inc. Reprinted by permission from Volume 15, No. 3 (January/February 1992), page 282.

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