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You have recently released a marvelous CD Album with Mozart's music, specially written for 2 instruments. Can you tell us about your choice of the pieces to be featured on the Album and its reasons, and about the recording sessions? And what the instruments used? In particular, Cosbey's violin is a Klotz! A couple of pieces (2 premieres) have a very curious, but important story behind them (for the comprehension of 18th-century everyday music practice): can you talk about them? | |
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It was an absolute delight to record Mozart's two Duos for Violin and Viola (K.
423 and K. 424)! Catherine and I chose these duos for a number of reasons. First, it should be said, these are fabulous pieces: although they are the most intimately scored of Mozart's string chamber works, there's nothing small about them. They feature some incredibly inventive string writing... ... (the violin writing in particular is far more exciting than what we find in many of Mozart's concertos),... ... amazing textures, melodies that prefigure operatic arias in Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte, and a huge amount of fun interaction between the players. So one reason we wanted to explore this repertoire was to give these excellent pieces the attention they deserve! There are some other reasons too, however... ... One of them is that Catherine and I are embarking on a long-term project to record all of Mozart's chamber music (more about this below), and the duos felt like a good laboratory in which to develop a house style for phrasing, tempo flexibility, ornamentation, improvisation, and various other expressive devices. We want all of our performances to be genuinely experimental, and we decided to start the process with two players before expanding to larger forces. Particularly when it comes to embellishment, our goal was to do a lot more than is ever heard in modern-day performances of Mozart's string music, and it's a bit easier to be free with embellishments when you're dealing with just two instruments rather than three, four, five, or more. • See Dorian Bandy: Diary of a Recording: Mozart’s Duos for Violin and Viola Chapter: Embellishment 
• See Dorian Bandy: Embellishing Mozart's C-major Quintet [violinist.com] 
___________________ I'll also add that, as a musicologist, I find this program fascinating for some additional reasons. First, these duos were written at a turning point in Mozart's life as a chamber composer. He completed them in 1783, just as he was making an initial stab at writing the six quartets that would eventually be dedicated to Haydn. And something about the challenge of writing for the constrained forces of a string duo seemed to spark a revolution in his ability to handle string textures... ... Comparing his string writing from before the duos (in the violin concertos and early quartets, and even in the first wave of the Haydn quartets) with what came after,... ... it seems clear that these are the two pieces in which he really worked out just what the textural possibilities are when writing for strings. These two duos have a lot to tell us about Mozart's evolving style. The CD also contains world-premiere recordings of some other duos, including historical arrangements of arias from La clemenza di Tito, Mozart's last opera, as well as of the Violin Sonata K. 305. There was an enormous appetite for chamber arrangements of operas in Mozart's Vienna, and the Tito duos (arranged by J. C. Stumpf around 1792) would have made the opera available to a wide audience of consumers. The arrangement of K. 305 for two violins, published by an anonymous arranger in Paris around 1799, was only recently discovered in a Texas library by musicologist Laurel E. Zeiss, who wrote the album's liner notes. We're very grateful that Laurel shared this arrangement with us! ___________________ On this recording, Catherine plays a violin from the Klotz family (the same family of luthiers who made Mozart's instruments), and I play a viola from the same time by Magnus Stoss as well as an anonymous Austrian violin from around 1750. 
___________________ The sessions were a lot of fun (and also hard work!)... The trailer video—which was filmed spontaneously in the middle of the second recording day—really captures the feeling during the sessions! • See Dorian Bandy: Diary of a Recording: Mozart’s Duos for Violin and Viola Chapters: 1-Introduction 2-The Duos as Compositions 3-Interpretive Challenges 4-Embellishment |
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Dorian Komanoff Bandy and Catherine Cosbey | Mozart: String Duos [Trailer] |
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In 2023 you published a most interesting book on Mozart and his art: Mozart the Performer, Variations on the Showman's Art. You managed to draw a more accurate and precise portrait of Mozart, as amazing performer and improviser, with all his virtuoso tools and techniques, to captivate the audience: a most important aspect of his career and music, well known in general, but, unfortunately actually too long neglected and overlooked, in its real practical details! A part of the research and theory presented in your book can be heard directly in performance on your CD Album Mozart String Duos, making this CD a rare truer 18th-century performance document: can you tell us about this and the content of your book? What led you to carry out this research and write your book? | |
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Thank you for asking about my book! The book grew out of my lifelong interest in performing Mozart. I've always tried to find ways to make my performances of Mozart dramatic—not because I felt that I wanted to impose drama on the music, so to speak, but because I felt that Mozart's music is itself inherently dramatic. But as I embarked on my career and played and conducted Mozart with an ever wider group of colleagues, I found that my ideas about the music were not taken for granted as being obvious. A little later, I started a PhD in musicology, and I chose as my topic Mozartean embellishment—and I realized that, in order to write an account of embellishment in Mozart, I needed to revisit my ideas about the drama in his music, and sharpen them. That's the background for the book! The final published version of the book starts out with a very brief biographical account of Mozart as a performer, but I quickly make it clear that this is not really a history book but an interpretive guide to Mozart: what would happen if we take seriously the idea that he was, first and foremost, a musical showman, and follow the implications of that idea throughout his works? The first two chapters set up the historical background in Mozart's life and his piano playing; but the rest of the book is aimed at interpreters. The third chapter is about capturing the sense of improvisatory risk-taking in his music; the fourth is about embellishment; and the fifth is about musical narrative, character, and drama in the symphonies and operas. The final short chapter is written for performers who want further advice about translating these theoretical ideas into actual concerts or recordings. I'm very pleased to have had the chance to do that myself, with the String Duo recording! I hope that this work inspires other performers and Mozart-lovers as well. Indeed: even for those who don't themselves play this music, the mindset that motivated the book can inform the way we listen, offering an approach that can help someone find out just how much fun this music can be, or how to attend to the elements that make his music so moving. |
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________________________________________ DORIAN K. BANDY'S CD ALBUMS ________________________________________ • Mozart: String Duos (2025) • Calcutta 1789 (2023) • Lovers and Mourners (2023) • Telemann, Sonatas for Violin and Harspichord, Frankfurt 1715 (2018) |
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________________________________________ DORIAN K. BANDY'S BOOKS & PAPERS ________________________________________ BOOKS • Mozart the Performer, Variations on the Showman's Art (2023) • Chapter 6: Variation at the Intersections of Composition and Performance in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, in The Oxford Handbook of Musical Variation (2025) PAPERS • Mozart's Operatic Embellishments Cambridge Opera Journal (2021) • Violin Technique and the Contrapuntal Imagination in 17th-Century german Lands Oxford Early Music (2021) • Thema Da Capo: Another Look at Mozart's Embellishments Cambridge Eighteenth-Century Music (2022) • Beethoven's Rhethoric of Embellishment University of California 19th-Century Music (2022) • Donna Elvira and the Dark Places of the Heart Cambridge Journal of the Royal Musical Association (2024) BLOG Violinist.com • Embellishing Mozart's C-major Quintet • Accompanying Beethoven's Violin Sonatas • Diary of a Recording: Mozart’s Duos for Violin and Viola • Music and Humor: The Anatomy of a Musical 'Joke' • My Year of Listening and Reading • By Special Arrangement: the Merit in Transcriptions • March 2015 'Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta-' • Role Models, Historical Performance, and the Secular Self • Listening to the Listeners? • Art: What Makes It Great? |
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Mozart the Performer: A Conversation with Dorian Bandy and Dean Sutcliffe |
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In 2024 you were the winner of the Marjorie Weston Emerson Award for your paper: Thema da capo: Another Look at Mozart's Embellishments, Eighteenth-Century Music 19/1 (2022): 37–57, from the Mozart Society of America. Moreover you are serving now as Vice President of the Mozart Society of America. Can you tell us about your Award and your activity with the Mozart Society? What's your favourite MSA's Project? | |
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The Mozart Society of America is a wonderful organization! One of their activities is overseeing the Marjorie Weston Emerson award, which supports scholarly work on Mozart... ... In even-numbered years, the award goes to articles or chapters, and in odd-numbered years it goes to books. This is a wonderful initiative: it's a great way to see the current trends in Mozart scholarship, and I'm honored to have been a recipient... ... Incidentally, the article of mine that won the award is, in fact, the basis for about two-thirds of Chapter 4 from my book Mozart the Performer. The MSA also organizes or helps to organize various conferences, study days, and other events that support research into eighteenth-century music. One wonderful series with which many MSA members are involved is called Encounters with Eighteenth-Century Music, which hosts free, online events on a wide range of topics. I've been fortunate to participate in this series in the past, and some Mozart-related events are coming up this season. I encourage your readers to attend! Discover: Mozart Society of America: Encounters with Eighteenth-Century Music |
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One of your and Notturna's recent CD Album Calcutta 1789 received the Prix Opus, Album de l'année. This beautiful CD features also some music by Mozart's main music models from London: J.C. Bach and Abel! What can you say about the diffusion of Western music in 18th-century India? You are also a teacher, conductor, baroque violinist, and historical keyboardist. As Mozart's opera conductor, what's your personal approach to this repertoire? You are going to release a new CD Album with Chamber Music by Mozart, Boccherini and Gluck: what about this new production? What are your projects for the future? | |
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| One of my favorite collaborators is the historical oboist Christopher Palameta, who directs the chamber ensemble Notturna. Chris has a knack for coming up with fascinating programs, and he's responsible for the album Calcutta 1789. International commerce and trade does not only result in the exchange of goods; many aspects of culture often come along for the ride as well, and music is no exception. The album tries to give a picture of the music from eighteenth-century London that wound up in Calcutta via various trade routes—though it also features a bit of music originally from Calcutta as well! | ||
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Christopher Palameta and Sudeshna Maulik present Calcutta 1789 - Notturna |
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___________________ My upcoming CD of chamber music by Mozart, Gluck, and other contemporaries is also with Chris and Notturna, and is part of the series of Mozart chamber music I mentioned before. The program features the Mozart Oboe Quartet in a highly embellished reading that builds on my work with Catherine Cosbey on the string duos—and she plays in this new recording as well, though our roles our reversed: for the Oboe Quartet, I play violin and she plays viola. Chris, of course, is on the oboe, and we're joined by the wonderful American cellist Cora Swenson Lee. Alongside the Mozart quartet are chamber works for oboe and strings by many of his contemporaries, including a few premiers. We recorded this album in November 2024, and I'm looking forward to listening to it! I'll also mention an even newer project in the works: last month, I had the honor of recording three late Mozart Violin Sonatas (K. 454, K. 481, and K. 526) with the outstanding fortepianist Elizaveta Miller. Both this disc and the oboe chamber music will be out sometime in 2026, I believe! Elizaveta Miller: The Art of Transformation (2024) | ||
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___________________ As I said above, what I'm really looking for in all this repertoire is drama: I want to try to bring out as many different characters and surprises as I possibly can. What that means in practice, of course, varies widely in different works... ...In the String Duos album, Catherine and I tried to do this with tempo flexibility and embellishment. In the Violin Sonatas album I recorded with Elizaveta, there's far less embellishing: instead, we often aim to bring out a more meditative quality to the music, particularly the extraordinary (and strange!) slow movements, and we thus focus on textural and timbral manipulations with our instruments. I find opera to be particularly satisfying, since there are so many elements to play with—declamation, embellishment, rubato, and other effects for the singers, plus everything you can do with the orchestra. But ultimately the goal is always to serve—and heighten—the drama... ... This is my goal, whether I'm playing or writing myself, or teaching my students. |
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Your favourite work by Mozart and your favourite work by J. Haydn. |
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Impossible!
If I absolutely had to pick, it would be the operatic trilogy Mozart composed with Lorenzo da Ponte: Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte—a highly interconnected set that often acts like a single work. ... But I already feel sad to leave out Piano Concertos K. 449, K. 491 and K. 503, the Haydn Quartets, the Piano Quartets and Quintet, and the C-major and G-minor String Quintets. The slow movement of K. 614 is very much in my heart right now. But tomorrow the answers will have changed. Ditto for Haydn! If I absolutely had to pick something today, it might be the gorgeous slow movement of the Rider Quartet op. 74 no. 3, and yet I already feel sad not to have chosen the slow movement of op. 20 no. 5 or the F-minor piano variations. |
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J. Haydn, F-minor piano variations Hob.XVII:6 (1793). Elizaveta Miller, from CD: The Art of Transformation (2024) [Quartz/Naxos] Last section with influence on last Beethoven. |
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Do you have in mind the name of some neglected composer of the 18th century you'd like to see re-evaluated? | |
| Strangely, I would actually put early Mozart in this category: there's lots of early chamber music, operatic music, and sacred music that is so rarely heard it might as well be by a different composer. Beyond Mozart, I think C.P.E. Bach is surely the most underrated composer of the century. | ||
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Mozart, Dixit et Magnificat K193 (1774) [Herbert Kegel] |
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Name a neglected piece of music of the 18th century you'd like to see performed in concert with more frequency. | |
| Almost anything by C.P.E. Bach. His cello concertos get a fair amount of stage time, but his keyboard music, his symphonies, and especially his amazing vocal music all deserve much more attention. | ||
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C.P.E. Bach, Magnificat Wq. 215 (H772) [Universal Music Group] |
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Beside yours, have you read a particular book on Mozart Era you consider important for the comprehension of the music of this period? | |
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There are many books I adore!
Two that I constantly return to are Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart by Wye Allanbrook, and Mozart's Grace, by Scott Burnham. Both of these require technical knowledge, but the prose is gorgeous, and these writers offer a compelling account of the expressive power of Mozart's music. Charles Rosen's The Classical Style is also an old standby. If I can name an academic article as well, I would mention Roman Ivanovitch's lovely study Mozart's Art of Retransition, in the journal Music Analysis. It's much shorter than a book, but it beautifully captures much that is essential in Mozart's style. |
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Name a movie or a documentary that can improve the comprehension of the music of this period. | |
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I think Amadeus is a great choice!
It has lots of inaccuracies, and yet many events depicted in it really do have historical elements... ... Most of all, the music is really well handled in the film. About some Amadeus the film's inaccurancies, you can follow our new MozartCircle Series: Amadeus: the Fake Stories on x.com/MozartCircle |
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Amadeus - Director's Cut (Milos Forman): The Making of Amadeus |
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Amadeus: Official Trailer |
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Amadeus: Official Trailer ULTRA 4K HD |
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Do you think there's a special place to be visited that proved crucial to the evolution
of the 18th century
music? |
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I'd have to nominate Vienna, the adopted hometown of Mozart, Beethoven, and countless
others... ... But no single place says it all. If you want to understand Mozart's relationship with Vienna, for instance, it doesn't hurt to wander mapless around Prague... ... I guess, however, my real answer is “no”! To me, the best way to understand the music is not through historic sites but through careful analysis and interpretation. | ||
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| Thank you very much for having taken the time to answer our questions! | ||
| Thank you! | ||
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