MOZART & SCHUBERT
8½, 1963), Giulietta degli spiriti( 1965), Fellini Satyricon( 1969), Amarcord( 1973), and Prova d’ orchestra( 1979). But Fellini was only part of the story. All told, Rota produced some 150 film scores, including soundtracks for all the leading Italian directors of post-War cinema( Soldati, De Filippo, Visconti, Pietrangeli, Castellani, Zeffirelli), as well as for leading French, German, Soviet, and American directors, among them the first two installments of Francis Ford Coppola’ s The Godfather trilogy( 1972 and 1974, his score for the first winning an Oscar).
He also wrote a great deal of music for the concert hall. After studying composition at the Milan Conservatory, the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome, and the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, he settled definitively in Italy and let loose a freshet of“ classical” works. These included three symphonies, nearly a dozen concertos, lots of chamber music, numerous ballet scores, and a handful of operas. By and large these display a musical language clearly rooted in the mainstream of post-Romanticism.
His Concerto for Bassoon and Orchestra is a late work, begun as a single Toccata movement in 1974 and completed as a full three-movement concerto in 1977. The piece ranges through a broad stylistic palette. The buoyant first movement has waggish, Prokofiev-ish touches; the second is marked by expressive lyricism; and the third visits a variety of dance types— waltz, polka, siciliana, saraband, and galop, with a scherzo thrown in for good measure— as it works its way through six cleverly plotted variations on an insouciant theme.
Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, one bassoon( in the orchestra), two horns, one trumpet( ad libitum), harp, piano, and strings, in addition to the solo bassoon.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
MINUET IN C MAJOR, K. 409 [ 1782 ] Did you feel short-changed by Mozart’ s
Symphony No. 34? Did you sense it lacked something? In a way, it did. Broadly speaking, the history of the 18th-century symphony was marked by expansion from three movements around the middle of the century to four in the 1780s, the added movement being a minuet in spot number three. Put in Mozartian terms, nearly all the symphonies he wrote through mid-1771 had three movements, and nearly all written after that had four. Still, this was a form still in flux, and the rules were not cast in stone when Mozart composed his Symphony No. 34 in 1780. Some commentators view his reversion to a three-movement symphony after having written quite a few four-movement ones as a stridently conservative statement, although nothing else about that adventurous symphony is in the least conservative. In fact, his Symphony No. 33 also consisted of three movements until he added a minuet as an afterthought. He considered including a minuet in Symphony No. 34, too, and the manuscript shows that he completed 14 measures
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