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Schubert-Berio: Rendering per Orchestra
W.A. Mozart: Sinfonia Concertante KV 297b (Urfassung)
Symphony in D major KV 385 “Haffner”
Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg · Hubert Soudant, conductor

Documents of the Salzburg Festival – live-recording of the “Mozart Matinee” 1999 and 2002 with the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg under the baton of Hubert Soudant. In addition to Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony, two rarities are presented on this CD: Schubert/Berio’s Rendering for Orchestra and the Sinfonia concertante KV 297b in the original version for winds.

Interpretation and Reconstruction

The Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg, which has been closely intertwined with the summer festival in Salzburg since 1921 in a variety of roles, has consistently increased its activities in the festival in the course of the last years. During the festival’s first four decades, the Salzburg orchestra was primarily called on to perform works specifically related to the city’s history – Mozart serenades or sacred compositions in the basilica of St. Peter, for example, or later, the Mozart matinees initiated by Bernhard Paumgartner. During the 1960s, however, the ensemble was increasingly in demand for opera performances which the Vienna Philharmonic (the Salzburg festival’s undisputed and exclusive opera orchestra – and until 1957, symphony orchestra as well) could not fit into its busy schedule. At first, the Mozarteum orchestra played Mozart’s early operas and occasionally such works as Haydn’s Welt auf dem Mond or Pergolesi’s La serva padrona. The ensemble later played other repertoire as well. In recent decades, however, the Mozarteum orchestra has been entrusted with a wide range of works, from baroque operas and staged oratorios to the experimental scenic rendering of Franz Schmidt’s oratorio Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln. It has also premiered two commissioned operas, Gerhard Wimberger’s Fürst von Salzburg (1987) and Helmut Eder’s Mozart in New York (1991). Since 1992, however, the Mozarteum orchestra’s activities have increased radically. It was even more frequently requested to take on operatic duties at the Salzburg summer festival such as Gluck’s Iphigenie en Tauride, Mozart’s Entführung or Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus or concertante performances of seldom heard Italian or French operas.

The ensemble has also broadened its concert repertoire far beyond its original area – which speaks for the fact that over the course of time, the classical matinee and serenade cycles have greatly augmented the range of works they present.

The prerequisite for this was certainly the orchestra’s consistent musical development, which has brought it international acclaim especially during the last several years. Since appointing Hubert Soudant as its Principle Conductor, the Mozarteum Orchester has widened its horizons and increased its competence in many styles. This includes new, unaccustomed aspects of Mozart interpretation, the ability to perform Bruckner symphonies shoulder to shoulder with other orchestras at the summer festival or present contemporary music at a qualitatively high level.

This CD contains recordings made during the 1999 and 2002 Salzburg festivals, and documents two of the preceding examples. Rendering is the title of a work by Italian composer Luciano Berio, who died in 2003 at the age of 78. The musical material for this composition consists of three fragments from a Symphony in D by Franz Schubert (listed in the Deutsch catalog as number D 936 A), which Berio attempts to interpret – not to reconstruct or complete. He does this as a musician of the 20th century: one who played with new possibilities of generating sound, created new manners of expression and developed his own musical language throughout his entire career. As Berio says in his foreword to the score of Rendering, he wishes his treatment of what is probably Schubert’s last symphonic sketch to be understood as a type of “modern fresco restoration,” whose “goal is to refresh the old colors without completely concealing the centuries of damage to them.”

Berio uses the fragments which have come down to us – an Allegro maestoso, a two-part Andante, incomplete and unorchestrated, and the sketches for a scherzo-like final movement. At times, he cites this materially literally, at times relatively freely, adding voices to it differing greatly from those typical of the classical orchestra. Schubert’s original motives are sometimes quoted, sometimes used as the basis for original manipulation. Listeners occasionally perceive this as conscious alienation, occasionally as a sort of contemporary commentary. In any case, it is delightful to hear, and the more often one listens to this work, the more one understands and appreciates Berio’s occupation with the material.

The Sinfonia concertante in E-flat major, K. 297b, is not a fragment, but is not irrefutably considered to be a work of Mozart’s, at least in the form it has come down to us. During his 1779 stay in Paris, Mozart did write a Sinfonia concertante for solo winds and orchestra for musician friends in Mannheim. He writes to his father in Salzburg about this work, saying that it is for flute, oboe, horn and bassoon.

The work was long thought to have been lost, but when a copy of a Sinfonia concertante for oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon was found in the Berlin Hofbibliothek in 1868 - a work greatly resembling other Mozart works – it was believed to be the missing work, or at least a contemporary edition of that work. This so-called Sinfonia concertante is now part of the standard repertoire, and has enjoyed many extraordinary performances, including some at the summer festival in Salzburg. Doubts about the work’s authenticity have never completely been stilled, however. Even the attempt by musicologist Robert D. Levin to reconstruct the work have not allayed these suspicions.

Levin is convinced that the solo wind parts of the Berlin manuscript are authentic, i.e. just as Mozart composed them, and that only the orchestra parts were later changed and added to. His reconstruction retains the wind parts “as is” although he restores the instrumentation mentioned in Mozart’s letter: flute, oboe, horn and bassoon. Levin has taken the orchestra accompaniment, however, and reconstructed it the way Mozart might have: thinner, and especially in regard to the form of the third movement, terser. Levin’s version of the Sinfonia concertante was performed for the first time in Salzburg by the solo winds of the Mozarteum orchestra in a 1999 festival matinee. The last piece on our recording, Mozart’s Haffner Symphonie, K. 385, was performed in a Summer 2002 matinee, which began with Berio’s Rendering.