Ensemble Zefiro - Mozart: Sérénades & Divertimento (1996)

Ensemble Zefiro, a period instrument group, give careful, attentive readings of Mozart’s two big octet serenades. In each case the opening movement is rather deliberate but very exactly judged in terms of dynamics and accentuation, and collectively very efficiently and precisely executed. The remaining movements are taken quite quickly, especially the minuets (the second of K375 seems unduly so and the trio is done much more slowly; while the canonic one in K388 is a little lightweight). The Andante of K388 loses something of its warmth and depth of expression, and is a shade bland: there is not much feeling of how the music wants to be shaped and, austerely, the group never dwell on cadences or make caesuras where the lines should breathe, either in this movement or in the Adagio of K375. Often I felt that they observed the letter of the score without really entering into the spirit. The players’ individual musicianship seems very constrained.
That is where the English Concert Winds do very much better on the Hyperion disc. The actual sound is less blended, you might say less impersonal, and this is not only a matter of the recording: here we have a team of individual musicians who play with a natural spontaneity and listen and react to one another. The sound is livelier and richer though less unified; the strands are clearly discernible even in tuttis. It has two exceptional musicians at the top of the texture: Colin Lawson, whose clarinet playing is both sparkling and sensitive, especially in K375 where the clarinet tends to predominate, and Paul Goodwin, with much exquisite oboe playing, in the slow movement of K388 and perhaps most of all in the finale where the oboe variation has delightful refinements of timing. There are some distinguished touches from Anthony Halstead’s horn too; the first bassoonist, Alberto Grazzi, plays in both recordings, with due virtuosity in the bassoon variation in the K388 finale. The English group excel not only individually but in their sense of the architecture of the music, their natural feeling for the broader spans and the moulding of the climaxes. One flaw: in bar 32 of the first movement of K388, both times, there is a wrong second clarinet G (sounding F), introducing an unMozartian French sixth and creating an impossible dissonance. I don’t think this can be one of the textual rectifications claimed in the note for the new edition, based on Mozart’s autographs, that is used here (which I do not imagine improves on the excellent Neue Mozart-Ausgabe text, also based on the autographs and used for several previous recordings).
The Zefiro recording offers one of the pair of divertimentos Mozart wrote in 1773 for wind octet plus two cors anglais; these are very slender and rather odd little pieces, possibly not wholly by Mozart. It receives a cool, brisk reading here. The English Concert Winds disc offers as fill-up contemporary wind arrangements of Mozart’s three most popular opera overtures – these are somewhat cut versions, effectively arranged and played sympathetically; they make entertaining listening, a reminder of what the late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century listener could hear at a bandstand. This disc, full of imaginative and musicianly playing, can be firmly recommended.