Sinfonia Concertante in E flat major, K.297b

The origins of the Sinfonia Concertante in E flat for wind soloists and orchestra - not to be confused with the Sinfonia Concertante in the same key for violin and viola - are obscure. The only source for it is a manuscript in a nineteenth-century hand. No one knows who made the copy or what it was taken from. The likelihood is that it is an arrangement, probably not by Mozart himself, of the Sinfonia Concertante designed to show off the extraordinary skill of four Mannheim wind instrumentalists - the flautist Johann Wendling, the oboist Friedrich Ramm, the bassoonist Georg Ritter and the hornist Johann Stich - and scheduled for performance at the Concert Spirituel in Paris in 1778. The performance did not take place, however, and the score was lost.

Whatever its relation to the lost Sinfonia Concertante for flute, oboe, bassoon and horn, what we have now is a Sinfonia Concertante for oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn. Apart from the clarinet part, which was obviously furnished some time later, it could well have been written in the late 1770s and both the material and the structure are almost certainly by Mozart. Whoever was responsible for the scoring of the solo parts made an accomplished job of it, particularly in the recapitulation of the first movement and in a cadenza which is a remarkable wind quartet in miniature.

The Adagio is so informal that it amounts to an improvisation for the four soloists. It is a vaguely ternary construction with a middle section which is short but, because of the pathos expressed by the bassoon, equal in expressive value to the sections around it. The theme of the last movement is shared equally by soloists and orchestra - the first part for the quartet, the last bars for the orchestra. The pattern is preserved in the ten variations, each one of which features a solo instrument and all of which are rounded off by a flourish on oboes and horns.