CAMA Presents English Baroque Soloists ⫽ John Eliot Gardiner, conductor ⫽ Tuesday, April 12, 2022 ⫽ The Granada Theatre, Santa Barbara, California ⫽ 7:30PM

nant chords) in D major, but it also makes
the viola a bit louder, because tuning a
string higher means the string is more massive
in relation to its pitch, and a the greater
the mass‐to‐pitch ratio the louder the string,
up to a point. At some point the increased
tension interferes with the instrument’s
resonance, breaks the strings, or damages
the instrument. Playing the Sinfonia concertante
on a tuned‐up viola as Mozart wrote it
is mostly the province of period‐instrument
players. It wreaks havoc with the modern viola,
which is already strung at nearly twice
the tension of the 18th‐century instrument.
Mozart struck another blow for equal
viola rights by writing two viola parts in
the orchestra, and with the double‐basses
given their own part rather than playing
from a single bass part with the cellos and
continuo, the strings are always in six parts
(eight, counting the soloists). It lends some
richness to a work that is scored lightly, the
only other instruments being pairs of horns
and oboes.
The slow movement, one of Mozart’s
few slow movements in a minor key, brings
the atmosphere of an operatic lament. The
concluding rondo displays Mozart’s wealth
of melodic invention, as if he is seeing just
how many catchy tunes he can throw at the
listener before he needs to repeat one.
While we know from Mozart's personal
catalogue of his works that the Symphony
in E‐flat was finished June 26, 1788 in Vienna,
we know nothing for certain about
what was done with it or the other two
symphonies he composed that year, the
Portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Dated
c.1788–1790. Courtesy of Hampel Auctions, Munich,
Artist Unknown
last he would write. The lack of information
about them has bred a myth that they
were never performed in his lifetime. They
almost certainly were: he included symphonies
in concerts he gave in Leipzig in 1789
and Frankfurt in 1790, and would doubtless
have used the new ones. We also know that
a “grand symphony” by Mozart was performed
at a concert led by Antonio Salieri in
Vienna in April 1791. But there is no way to
identify a specific symphony with any occasion
because concert advertisements and
programs typically would not name symphonies
by key, and certainly not by number.
Mozart himself would have had no idea
what “Symphony number 39” meant; the
numbers we use for his symphonies were
18 CAMA'S 103 RD CONCERT SEASON