• Main Performer: Andrew Manze
• Languages of Booklet Text: French, English, German

Review

When you see a piece as familiar as Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik on the track list, and a thick, hardcover booklet inside the packaging, you have to expect some kind of radical interpretation. This odd but absorbing disc by Andrew Manze and the English Concert does not disappoint. Things start off fairly conventionally with Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the first work on the disc. The music is played on historical instruments, and the repeat of the second half of the first movement is taken -- both unorthodox choices, but neither unheard-of. Then one realizes that Manze is pushing the tempo slightly to highlight certain passages in the music, which sparkles in irregular patterns. It's not a major thing, just a distinctly different effect from the usual courtly, symmetrical Eine kleine Nachtmusik. The most striking passage comes in the minor central section of the slow movement, which has a much more strongly expressive, darker quality than usual. Maybe it's too much for a piece that's supposed to be a serenade, but it certainly catches your attention.

Things get really wild with the beginning of the next piece on the program, the Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546. This is one of Mozart's intense, intellectual works, originating in a version for two pianos intended for the circle of the aristocratic Bach enthusiast Baron von Swieten. Coming after the finale of Eine kleine Nachtmusik, it sounds like a work by Shostakovich has suddenly begun -- the effect is startling, and way beyond the degree of internal contrast that's the norm for an all-instrumental Mozart disc, but also very compelling. A small orchestral minuet, K. 485c, comes next -- not minuet-like at all in this performance, but with every bit of interesting part-writing and rhythmic ambiguity carefully chiseled out. Manze's sharp, surprising, detailed approach perhaps works best of all on the Serenata notturna, K. 239, a work that can sound pretty dull in the clockwork interpretations it is sometimes given. The disc concludes with Ein musikalische Spaß, K. 522 -- "A Musical Joke" that is usually thought to represent Mozart having fun at the expense of an incompetent band of village musicians and their equally hapless town composer. In Manze's fully fleshed-out reading it almost seems like another kind of joke altogether, a bit of intellectual fun in which Mozart sets out to construct coherent movements out of musically unpromising materials. The work has never been performed in a way that sounds remotely similar to this, and for that reason alone the disc is worth hearing. This is not your father's Mozart, or even your friends', and it tries to dissuade you from the conviction that with Mozart, less is usually more. But Manze and the English Concert never fall into the brittle sound that afflicts many Baroque ensembles that move into the Mozart realm, and the program as a whole ends up making sense in a way that some of its parts do not. It's an ambitious disc that demands attention. ~ James Manheim, All Music Guide

Performances

Composer	Title	Time
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart	Serenade No. 13 for strings in G major ("Eine kleine Nachtmusik"), K. 525	20:51
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart	Adagio and Fugue for string quartet (or string orchestra) in C minor, K. 546	7:00
Thomas Attwood	Menuet and Trio in C major (with W.A. Mozart: aka K. 485a)	2:24
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart	Serenade No. 6 for orchestra in D major ("Serenata Notturna"), K. 239	13:45
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart	Divertimento for 2 horns & strings in F major ("Ein musikalischer Spass," "A Musical Joke"), K. 522	23:08