Recording
Title: Wind Concertos . Serenade K361
Performers: English Chamber Orchestra
Director: Daniel Barenboim
Year: 1976
Length: 50 minutes
Review
This is one of the first works we have here almost exclusively for wind instruments, with just a bass to keep rhythm in here, and 13 wind instruments it is a pretty impressive piece of work.
The whole work revolves around the sublime adagio, that makes Salieri in the film think that Mozart has been touched by God, and it is hard not to think something similar when hearing the heavenly simplicity of it.
Unfortunately other movements pale in comparison, but if there was no adagio they would be stupendous by themselves. So it is a great work made sublime by an amazing adagio, one of the most sensitive and beautiful pieces of music ever composed.
Final Grade
9/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
In the 1984 film Amadeus, Antonio Salieri's first encounter with Mozart is at a performance of this work. Salieri has not been impressed with Mozart's boorish behavior before the performance, but as he looks at the music on the page, he describes the beauty and delight of the solo oboe's entry soon thereafter followed by the clarinet's line (in the third movement), leading him to say, “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 voice of God.” It is at this point that Salieri first questions how God could choose a vulgar man like Mozart as his voice; this question becomes a primary theme of the film.
The famous scene from the film:
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