Mozart: Gran Partita Soloists Ensemble TREVOR PINNOCK CONDUCTOR ROYAL ACADEMY OF MUSIC SOLOISTS ENSEMBLE (1756–1791) Serenade in B flat major, K. 361, ‘Gran Partita’ q Largo – Allegro molto ...... 8:00 w Menuetto ...... 8:07 e Adagio ...... 5:19 r Menuetto: Allegretto ...... 4:25 t Romance: Adagio ...... 6:46 y Tema con variazioni ...... 9:28 u Finale: Allegro molto ...... 3:28

JOSEPH HAYDN (1732–1809) Notturno No. 8 in G major, Hob. II:27 i Largo – Allegro ...... 5:36 o Adagio ...... 6:25 a Finale: Vivace assai ...... 2:57

Total Running Time: 60 minutes

2 Recorded at St George’s, Bristol, UK, 16–18 April 2015 Produced by Jonathan Freeman-Attwood Recorded by Robert Cammidge Assistant engineering by Andrew Lang Post-production by Julia Thomas and Philip Hobbs Cover image The Schloss Kammer on the Attersee III, by Gustav Klimt. By permission of Bridgeman Images Design by gmtoucari.com

We are grateful for Lady Susie Sainsbury’s generous support of the Royal Academy of Music’s recordings with Linn.

3 HARMONIOUS CONTENTMENT AT THE CLOSING OF THE DAY: MOZART, HAYDN AND THE SERENADE TRADITION

The light of reason, knowledge and order banishes the darkness of superstition, ignorance and chaos. This fundamental symbol of the German Enlightenment found its archetypal musical manifestation in two late-eighteenth-century masterpieces: the radiant final scene (‘Die Strahlen der Sonne vertrieben die Nacht’) in Die Zauberflöteand the ear-shattering cosmic moment when light is created in Die Schöpfung. But that blaze should not blind us to the era’s counter-currents, including its attraction to the crepuscular and the high value placed on the irrational pleasures of entertainment. The fading of the light acquired rich cultural resonance in the eighteenth century. In Mozart’s operas, for example, twilight and darkness are more than simply the backdrop to key points in the action, but become integral to the thematic web of the drama. Don Giovanni’s nocturnal townscape is a place of concealment, mistaken identity, fear, violence and mortal danger, and a time of supernatural intervention in human affairs, made all the more strange and terrifying by its proximity to sumptuous partying

4 and the mask of urbane hospitality. In contrast, night is a time of transgressive hope in Die Entführung aus dem Serail. The heroine Konstanze’s longed-for rescue is planned for the stroke of midnight. And out of the darkness and silence of the scene comes Pedrillo’s chivalrous romance ‘In Mohrenland’ whose musical otherness haunts the memory long after the gaudy glitter of the opera’s janissary music has passed. Most complex is the twilight garden setting of the final act of Le nozze di Figaro, where the social order of the household is blurred, identities shift, and in the shadows truths are spoken and recognized which could not be voiced or acknowledged in the light of day. Of course, the forgiveness and reconciliation to which this leads are provisional. But the beauties of the dusk and the music sustain a utopia made all the more poignant because it is fleeting. Pastoral idylls like Figaro’s carried a special charge because they were designed for the entertainment of an urban elite. During the eighteenth century the status and purpose of public entertainment underwent a gradual transformation from a frivolous diversion, a turning away from the serious business of life, to a savouring of play and pleasure which was an elevated good in and of itself. In his 1805 essay celebrating the centenary of the great art historian and critic Winckelmann, Goethe expressed this new aesthetic stance in transcendent terms:

5 When the healthy nature of man operates as a single whole, when he feels the world around him as a grand, beautiful, worthy, and precious whole, when harmonious contentment grants him a pure, free pleasure – then the universe, if it could perceive itself, would cry out as having arrived at its goal and would admire the pinnacle of its own growth and essence. For what is the point of all the expenditure of suns and planets and moons, of stars and Milky Ways, of comets and galactic nebulae, of worlds born and yet to be born, if at the end a happy human being cannot rejoice in his being. ‘Pure, free pleasure’ granted by ‘harmonious contentment’ neatly encapsulates the artistic values of the musical genres wherein the crepuscular and the entertaining met in the eighteenth century: the serenade and the notturno. Both genres had originally developed in vocal music – to be performed at night and with texts alluding to the night, but by the 1780s their names had been appropriated by musicians in Italy and Germany to describe instrumental music, often performed out of doors, in the hours of darkness. The serenade was an evening entertainment (with some writers suggesting a 9pm performance as most appropriate) while the notturno was customarily performed later (between 11pm and midnight).

6 MOZART’S ‘GRAN PARTITA’

Serenades for groups of wind instruments were especially popular in Bohemia and southern Germany in the 1780s, due not least to the high standards of wind playing in those regions and to the relatively low costs to aristocrats of maintaining a wind band as their domestic ensemble. The peaks of this repertoire are the three wind serenades Mozart wrote in Vienna in the early 1780s. But the precise circumstances of the composition of the greatest of these – Mozart’s largest and arguably his most innovative instrumental work, the Serenade in B flat major, K. 361 ‘Gran Partita’ – is occluded in shadow. Its date is uncertain. It is not an uncontested fact that Mozart conceived its seven movements as a unified work. And the biggest puzzle is what might have prompted the composer to smash the decorum of generic and ensemble conventions so flamboyantly. Given its size and importance, it is surprising that the piece is not mentioned in Mozart’s surviving correspondence. And there is no entry for it in his Catalogue of all my Works (though this absence might help us narrow down the plausible window for the work’s date). What evidence we do have – an autograph manuscript, some ambiguous newspaper reports, and uncorroborated posthumous testimonies – only deepens the mystery by pointing in contradictory directions.

7 The presence of excellent wind players in Vienna, especially those clarinet and basset horn virtuosi the Stadler brothers, may have been a fundamental prompt to Mozart’s imagination; but it was only one among many factors, including the composer’s encounter with the wind writing of his older contemporaries (especially J. C. Bach and Christian Cannabich) and his earlier opportunities to write for virtuoso wind players (for example, in Idomeneo of 1780). Another crucial element, particularly in relation to the scale of the work, was the markedly competitive streak in Mozart’s compositional projects during his early Viennese career. The ‘Haydn’ Quartets, the piano concertos and Die Entführung aus dem Serail all deliberately set out to confront and surpass the achievements of Mozart’s leading contemporaries, and the ‘Gran Partita’ ought to be seen as another part of this large pattern. Another significant part of the background to this work was the Salzburg serenade tradition that Mozart had just left behind: one that prized discursiveness, variety and instrumental colour, and which was not renowned for pithy utterance. All this might support what the paper types of the Serenade’s autograph manuscript suggest: that Mozart wrote the piece shortly after he arrived in Vienna in 1781. There is no evidence that the composer ever heard the piece in its entirety, though it is likely that four of its movements were publicly performed in Vienna in 1784.

8 In some respects the ‘Gran Partita’ is two pieces for the price of one. Its monumental first movement is followed by two contrasting examples of each type of symphonic movement: two slow movements (the operatic-ensemble-like ‘Adagio’, third movement, and the tripartite ‘Romanze’, fifth movement), two ‘Minuets’ (second and fourth movements, each with trios), and two finale types (the theme and variations, sixth movement, and the ‘Turkish’ style ‘Rondo’, seventh movement). The musical ambition of the entire work is proclaimed at the start, with the full sonority of the first four notes answered by an expressive, sweet phrase on a solo clarinet. Immediately the music’s driving principles are sonority, colour, texture, concertante effects, the juxtaposition of contrasting styles, and the mutability of musical ideas. This is not one of Mozart’s most learnèd scores – he didn’t set out to dazzle with contrapuntal display or formal complexity – but its sensuousness and variety are unsurpassed. The tinta of the piece comes not only from the rich possibilities of different colour combinations within a thirteen-part tutti, but also from the preponderance of instruments whose centre of gravity is in the alto and tenor registers: the pairs of clarinets, basset horns, and the four horns. This enabled Mozart to include subtly differentiated dark sonorities in the Serenade’s textures, imagining

9 in musical terms the changing half-light of the closing day: whether the second movement’s trio with the clarinets and basset horns, the writing in its second trio, the accompaniment of the operatic dialogue in the ‘Adagio’ third movement, or – perhaps the work’s most breathtaking sonority – the sustained pianissimo chord towards the end of the ‘Adagio’ variation in the sixth movement, where Mozart came as close as he ever would to making time stand still in perfect felicity.

HAYDN’S NEAPOLITAN MUSIC ANGLICIZED

Haydn’s Notturno No. 8 in G major, Hob. II:27, belongs to a set of nine works written between 1788 and 1790 for Ferdinand IV of Naples. In their original form these notturni were for an ensemble which, like the ‘Gran Partita’, emphasized delicate alto sonorities: two clarinets in C, two violas, two horns, a ‘basso’, and two lire organizzate. The lira organizzata, a favourite of King Ferdinand, is a hybrid instrument combining features of the hurdy-gurdy and the organ. In its disembodied vocality, the lira’s unique sound is as enchanting, otherworldly and uncanny as that other eighteenth-century musical curio, the glass harmonica. Haydn took his new notturni to London

10 in his first visit of 1791–2; but, aside from the impossibility of sourcing lire organizzate, the private, late-night context of the works’ Neapolitan origins could hardly be replicated in the large concert spaces at Haydn’s disposal in the English capital. So Haydn rescored the pieces, replacing the lire and clarinets with flute, oboe and violins respectively. In doing so, he let the daylight back into the music. The Notturno has all the scintillating argumentativeness and wit that one might expect of mature Haydn. Its outer movements, in particular, occupy a niche between the conversational style of Haydn’s contemporary string quartets and the grand public statements of his ‘London’ Symphonies. The central ‘Adagio’ is one of his sublime ternary-form inspirations, with a particularly muted minore section in the middle. In the fragility of its textures, which often diminish into just two voices, the ‘Adagio’ looks back to the delicate symphonic slow movements so characteristic of Haydn in the early 1770s. And in its London version the ghostly nostalgia which ought to have permeated the midnight performances in Naples still echoes through the new scoring. But energetic comedy has the last word. The ‘hunting’ ‘Finale’ certainly brings a smile to the face, but repose? It must have been hard to get off to sleep after this. © Timothy Jones, 2016

11 ROYAL ACADEMY OF MUSIC

‘The Royal Academy of Music in London is internationally known and recognized as representing the highest values of music and musical society.’ DANIEL BARENBOIM ‘This building has been absolutely at the centre of everything that I have done; everything that I have learnt.’ SIR SIMON RATTLE The Royal Academy of Music has been training musicians to the highest professional standards since its foundation in 1822. As Britain’s senior conservatoire, its impact on musical life, both in the UK and abroad, is inestimable. The music profession is permeated at all levels with Academy alumni, including classical giants such as Sir Simon Rattle and Sir Harrison Birtwistle, pop icons Sir Elton John and Annie Lennox, a host of opera stars such as Dame Felicity Lott, Lesley Garrett and Susan Bullock, principals in some of the world’s leading orchestras (including the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras, the Orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera New York, and all of London’s leading

12 orchestras), innovative soloists including Dame Evelyn Glennie and Joanna MacGregor, bestselling recording artists such as Katherine Jenkins, and media celebrities Gareth Malone, Aled Jones and Myleene Klass. An institution that trained Sir Arthur Sullivan, Sir Henry Wood, Sir John Barbirolli, Lionel Tertis, Dame , Dame Moura Lympany, Richard Lewis, Dennis Brain, Sir Clifford Curzon, Philip Langridge and John Dankworth, and with strong associations back to Mendelssohn, is bound to be proud of its history; but the Academy is firmly focused on refreshing creative traditions for tomorrow’s musical leaders in the classical, jazz, media and musical theatre worlds. Every year some of the most talented young musicians from over fifty countries come to study at the Academy, attracted by renowned teachers and by a rich artistic culture that broadens their musical horizons, develops their professional creativity and fosters their entrepreneurial spirit. In addition to a busy schedule of lessons, classes and masterclasses, students benefit from the Academy’s ambitious and unrivalled calendar of concerts, operas, musical theatre shows and other events, in which they work with leading

13 practitioners and visiting professors such as Sir , Sir Mark Elder, Trevor Pinnock, Stephen Hough, Maxim Vengerov, Semyon Bychkov and Sir Thomas Allen. Appointments to the Academy’s staff in 2014/15 have included Edward Gardner, Simon Keenlyside, Oliver Knussen and Robin Ticciati. Ever since its inception, the Academy has been committed to transporting its musical activities from its central London home to the widest possible national and international audiences. Today, Academy students perform at many leading venues and festivals, including Wigmore Hall, Southbank Centre, Kings Place and the Aldeburgh Festival. They collaborate with distinguished partners such as the London Sinfonietta, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Juilliard School in high-profile projects that attract national attention and critical plaudits. In 2012 and 2015, the Academy and New York’s Juilliard School joined forces in sensational concerts at the Lincoln Center, Boston Early Music Festival, Leipzig Bach Festival, the BBC Proms and the Academy’s own Duke’s Hall.

14 The Academy’s own recordings with Linn and its own CD label have received critical acclaim. (‘While the big record companies flounder, the independents flourish. The Royal Academy of Music’s own label is a case in point, with some jolly good recordings in its catalogue.’ Metro). The Academy is committed to lifelong learning, ranging from the Junior Academy that trains musicians up to the age of 18, through many Open Academy community music projects with schools in London and further afield, to performances and educational events for the musically curious of all ages. The Academy’s museum is home to one of the world’s most significant collections of instruments and artefacts. Highlights include the important collection of Italian stringed instruments (with many examples by Stradivari, Guarneri and members of the Amati family), a unique collection of nineteenth-century keyboard instruments, composers’ manuscripts (including Purcell’s The Fairy Queen and Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis) and collections that belonged to Sir Henry Wood, Sir John Barbirolli,

15 Lord Menuhin, , Sir Charles Mackerras, Nadia Boulanger, Richard Lewis, Robert Spencer, Norman McCann and David Munrow. These collections are an invaluable educational and artistic resource for the Academy’s entire community, underpinning teaching and research and enabling young musicians to find their own artistic profile in the context of musical riches of the past. As the Academy approaches its bicentenary it goes from strength to strength. In the past three years alone, the Academy has been rated the top conservatoire in the country for student satisfaction in the National Student Survey, top conservatoire in The Times University Guide and the best conservatoire for research by The Times Higher. ‘A student’s choice of university makes a difference when it comes to finding a job or a place in a graduate program...The Royal Academy of Music was the only British post-secondary institute with a perfect score.’ NEW YORK TIMES, 2013

16 TREVOR PINNOCK CONDUCTOR ROYAL ACADEMY OF MUSIC SOLOISTS ENSEMBLE

VIOLIN 1 FLUTE CONTRABASSOON Kate Suthers Brontë Hudnott Alice Quayle VIOLIN 2 OBOE HORN Kate Oswin Thomas Blomfield Elliot Seidman Rebecca Woodward Dewi Jones VIOLA Alexei Watkins Matthew Maguire CLARINET Julia Payne Joseph Griffin Jordan Black Charles Dale-Harris CELLO António Novais BASSET HORN Antanas Makštutis DOUBLE BASS Joseph Hyung Sup Lim Nathan Knight BASSOON Joshua Wilson Hannah Robinson

17 Photograph by Peer Lindgreen Peer Photograph by

18 TREVOR PINNOCK

Trevor Pinnock was born in 1946 in Canterbury. At the age of six, he entered the cathedral choir school there and also commenced piano studies with June Smith, who taught him until he was eleven. As a teenager, Pinnock moved on to the organ. In 1964 he took and organ lessons with Nicholas Jackson before gaining an ARCM and a scholarship to the , where he studied with Ralph Downes (organ) and Millicent Silver (harpsichord). At the college he started his first ensemble, the Galliard Harpsichord Trio, with Stephen Preston (flute) and Anthony Pleeth (cello). They rehearsed regularly at the Benton Fletcher Collection of historical instruments at Fenton House, Hampstead. In 1972 Pinnock formed the English Concert to perform on period instruments. The ensemble set new standards, and by the late 1970s had toured as far afield as Iran and Australia and made its first recordings, for the CRD label. In 1978 a contract to record on Deutsche Grammophon’s Archiv label brought the ensemble to greater international prominence. J.S. Bach’s Orchestral Suites and, especially, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (with Simon Standage) were the first of the stream of recordings that followed, which included major

19 works by Bach, Handel, Corelli, Vivaldi, Haydn and Mozart. As solo , Pinnock also recorded Bach’s Partitas and Toccatas and Handel’s Suites. In 2003 Pinnock decided to hand over the English Concert to his fellow musicians. He is now a regular guest conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, Deutschekammerphilharmonie Bremen, Kammerorchester Basel, Kammerakademie Potsdam and Kioi Sinfonietta. He works frequently with pianist Maria João Pires and flautist Emmanuel Pahud. An important part of Pinnock’s work is with students of the Royal Academy of Music, whom he conducts in concert and opera. With the Royal Academy of Music Soloists Ensemble he has recorded three albums of music with Linn based on Schoenberg’s private concerts as well as this release.

20 21 ALSO AVAILABLE ON LINN CKD 516

Trevor Pinnock Trevor Pinnock Trevor Pinnock & Royal Academy & Royal Academy & Royal Academy of Music Soloists of Music Soloists of Music Soloists Ensemble Ensemble Ensemble Mahler: Lieder eines Bruckner: Mahler: fahrenden Gesellen Symphonie No. 2 Symphonie No. 4

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791) Serenade in B flat major, K. 361, ‘Gran Partita’ q Largo – Allegro molto ...... 8:00 w Menuetto ...... 8:07 e Adagio ...... 5:19 r Menuetto: Allegretto ...... 4:25 ROYAL ACADEMY OF MUSIC SOLOISTS ENSEMBLE SERENADE IN B FLAT MAJOR, K. 361, ‘GRAN PARTITA’ TREVOR PINNOCK t Romance: Adagio ...... 6:46 y Tema con variazioni ...... 9:28 u Finale: Allegro molto ...... 3:28

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART JOSEPH HAYDN (1732–1809) Notturno No. 8 in G major, Hob. II:27 WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART WOLFGANG i Largo – Allegro ...... 5:36 o Adagio ...... 6:25 1) Finale: Vivace assai ...... 2:57

TREVOR PINNOCK TREVOR ‘GRAN PARTITA’ 361, K. MAJOR, SERENADE IN B FLAT OF MUSIC SOLOISTS ENSEMBLE ACADEMY ROYAL Total Running Time: 60 minutes

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