WOLFGANG A. MOZART (1756-1791)
Overtures of:
DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE | LE NOZZE DI FIGARO | COSI FAN TUTTE
DON GIOVANNI | DIE ENTFUEHRUNG AUS DEM SERAIL
IDOMENEO...
NORWEGIAN NATIONAL OPERA ORCHESTRA,
RINALDO ALESSANDRINI
INTERVIEW WITH RINALDO ALESSANDRINI
(excerpts from the liner notes)
The programme of this CD is quite original. How did you put it together?
The idea was to record repertoire that I had worked on a lot with the orchestra in previous years. I had already conducted La clemenza di Tito and other orchestral and operatic music by Mozart. And it seemed to me that the orchestra’s response was excellent. So it was quite natural to select this repertoire, since we had to give priority to the orchestra and abandon the use of singers.
Is there any point in recording operatic overtures end-to-end like this?
It made it necessary to consider each piece for what it is in musical terms, to think of it as a moment of music that is sometimes sublime. So I tried to give priority to a vocabulary that is more symphonic than operatic.
What was Mozart trying to do in his overtures? Did his style evolve in them, and if so how?
His style grew more complex in parallel with the rest of his output. Over the years, Mozart gained in details of articulation, in the profundity of his melodic inspiration, in the elaborateness of his harmonies, and above all in the instrumentation, which grew extremely ornate. None of his
contemporaries could match him in this respect. In comparison, Haydn’s orchestration is much
simpler.
Finally, do you approach Mozart in the same way as earlier repertoires?
I don’t believe in ‘visionary’ composers, with very few exceptions. Mozart, in particular, doesn’t look to the future, he looks to what was happening in his own time. I don’t think the musicians who played his music could forget in two minutes all the performance practice of the previous decades, except for changes due to modifi cations in the way the instruments were built. To play Mozart as if he were a nineteenth-century composer would seem grotesque to me. But to play him like an
eighteenth-century composer brings out the intuitions and the genius which are his alone and which go beyond the norms of his time.
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