Known to contemporary audiences through the movie Amadeus, Mozart’s Serenade for winds was taken from obscurity to immortality as Salieri is transfixed by his introduction to the composer’s music:
“On the page it looked nothing. The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse, bassoons, and basset horns, like a rusty squeezebox. Then suddenly, high above it, an oboe, a single note, hanging there unwavering, till a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I’d never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing. It seemed to me that I was hearing the very voice of God.” — from Amadeus
Performed as part of the 2024 Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera and Humanities Festival.