Marco Iannelli’s new chamber ensemble score for Mozart’s eighth opera La finta giardiniera, commissioned by Hong Kong’s Musica Viva, had a typhoon-delayed premiere on 2 September 2023 at the Hong Hong City Hall.
He wrote in the house programme:
“How does one dare ‘transcribe’ an opera written by Mozart?”, I said to myself when I’d been asked to “reduce” the original orchestral score for a new ensemble of just 15 musicians. But I couldn’t help myself: the challenge was more than intriguing.
“La Finta Giardiniera” is Mozart’s first opera written at an age most of us might consider adult, but still quite far from the “level” of the first of his operas that are still performed with regularity, “Die Entführung aus dem Serail”, written seven years later. Yet, from a musical perspective, the characteristics of Mozart’s style are all already discernible: along to his innate notable elegance, we already encounter the enchanting loveliness of straightforward melodies as well as simple but effective chord progressions.
These were qualities I needed to maintain, obviously. The challenge was in the instrumentation, or rather in the way Mozart created a quite unusual colour palette to highlight the psychological peculiarities of each character. The original instrumentation, in fact, kept changing according to the scene or the singer: oboes and horns in one aria; trumpets and timpani in another; or just strings in the next one. How was I to keep the same dynamic colourfulness within the size of a chamber orchestra?
I decided to select the wind instruments with the widest range (flute, clarinet and bassoon) while keeping the traditional string quartet, but boosting the role of the double bass. Then with a magnifier I began to dissect all of the original melodic lines, themes, effects, details and weave them in a new musical thread, made with exactly the same material, but meticulously reallocated to the new instrumentation. If before we had the power of trumpets or French horns, now we have the energy of bassoon and double bass; while flute and clarinet are in dialogue in the place of oboes.
But just as the dance figured in eighteenth-century ball rooms, also here the instrumental couples keep changing, following the drama and the comedy, feelings and personalities, giving back to the audience (hopefully) the same freshness and originality of Mozart’s creation.