Archived under: Horn music, Humor, Rare/cool or just odd | Mozart
Mozart Rondo Smoothies
This post is a prologue to an upcoming series on the Mozart Horn Concertos, starting in earnest next Tuesday Monday. Topics will include: some simple basics, resources and tips, interpretive suggestions and a few ideas on cadenzas.
The Horn concertos of W.A. Mozart are among some of the most treasured of the horn repertoire. We are most fortunate to have such great music in our performance catalog.
An accidental remix
A colleague long ago told a story to me about a rehearsal where she was working on a Mozart Rondo with her piano accompanist. Things were going fairly well for a while when suddenly the two parts did not seem to match at all.
It took a few minutes of head scratching until they figured what had happened.
It turned out that while the soloist was playing the Rondo in E-flat from the 4th concerto, her pianist was reading the music to the Rondo from the 2nd concerto. In spite of this, the mixed combination actually worked for a while before falling apart.
They had a good laugh upon discovering this.
Stacking rondos
That story has inspired a bit of digital mischief done with audio software. These are posted here just for fun and amusement.
First, stacking the 2nd and 4th right on top of each other:
The vertical alignment goes askew every now and then between the two tracks due to some tempo fluctuations, but the similarities between the melodic and harmonic profiles for the first minute or so are very close.
Mashups
From the three E-flat concertos, the opening themes are mixed into mini-mashups.
Variation 1:
Variation 2:
Variation 3:
Related to this article
- News from 1988: The Concert Rondo now has Sixty More Measures
Several times recently I have noted that it is not widely enough known that the Concert Rondo of Mozart, K. 371, is actually sixty measures longer than the old standard editions of the work. The sixty “new” measures of music were discovered in 1988 on a... - Want to Hear Some Mozart 3 Cadenzas?
I was recently sent a link to a Spanish horn website, www.soytrompista.com. My Spanish is minimal, but I was interested to check it out as it had some recordings on it. What I found was one section of the site is devoted to recordings of cadenzas.... - The Words to Mozart 4:3/Flanders and Swann
Working on the third movement of Mozart 4 with students I often bring up the topic of “the words” to the movement. Many musical works have words that are known among players, such as the opening of Ein Heldenleben “Strauss couldn’t write for the horn,” etc.... - Video: Mozart K. 407 on Natural Horn
Today I played a bit of natural horn for a change and also spotted this great video among a group of recently posted videos of performances by Javier Bonet. This clip is the last movement of the Mozart Quintet, K. 407 in a great performance on... - Even More Dennis Brain
This past week I heard from a former student who had looked over my top 10 CD list. In the list I include the Dennis Brain CD of the Mozart Concertos, which was actually the first horn record I ever purchased (on vinyl) and is a... - A Tale of Cover Stock
Developing the first four publications with Horn Notes Edition we looked over a lot of other publications and had a sense of what we wanted it to look like. In particular my wife and I both really liked the cover stock used by Birdalone Music in...
Big Fish Eats Little Fish, Symphony Eats Opera
Then: Double Horn and Descant at the Audition. Now?
The Birth of Venus and Her Horn
On Talking in Rehearsals
