Juilliard Wind Orchestra Performs Mozart

Though it was raining heavily in New York City yesterday afternoon, there was still a good size crowd on hand for this week's Wednesdays at One installment that featured at this performance the Juilliard Wind Orchestra.  Only one work was performed at the hour-long recital, the Serenade No. 10 in B-flat Major, K. 361 (1781) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

While it was not Mozart who gave the work its name Gran Partita, the title is fully deserved both for the serenade's length and its grandeur of expression.  Those which Mozart had composed in Salzburg were much shorter and of lighter weight, more in the nature of divertimentos.  The music here progresses in a more stately fashion while still possessing a captivating beauty.  If the K. 361 was indeed composed in 1781, as determined by the paper type used by Mozart when writing it, the work would have been one of the first pieces the composer devised upon his arrival in Vienna.  Wind orchestras had great popularity during this period, and Mozart may have intended the work to be played at some public celebration as a way of introducing himself to the Viennese citizenry.  Its premiere must have been successful because an abbreviated version consisting of only four movements was encored three years later at a concert given by the virtuoso Anton Stadler for whom Mozart later wrote both his Clarinet Quintet, K. 581 and his Clarinet Concerto, K. 622.

The work is scored for thirteen instruments - twelve winds and a double bass.  The use of a stringed instrument implies that the work was originally intended for indoor performance; if the piece were on some other occasion to be played in an outdoor setting a contrabassoon could easily be substituted in its place .  (There can be no question of which instrument Mozart had in mind when composing the work because the bass part contains pizzicato markings.)   Unusually, at yesterday's performance both a contrabass and a contrabassoon were included in the instrumentation.  No reason was given for this arrangement.

I had not heard Juilliard's Wind Orchestra in some time and was impressed at the high level of performance.  This was as seamless a presentation of Mozart's great work as one could have wished.