Mozart KV 370b+371

I’m learning some Mozart I’ve never learned before, for my end-of-year exam. What’s this, you say? How can a horn player get this far and not have learned all the Mozart solo repertoire there is?

Well, simply put, when I started learning the horn there were fewer known fragments of the work. Even now it can be difficult to get hold of. Some recordings I have seem to mis-label the first movement as being KV 307b instead of 370b. I’ve been able to find two published editions, reconstructed by two different people. The manuscript for 371, the Concert Rondo, was only completed in 1989 and previous editions are missing bits.

This morning I have been looking at the score of 370b in the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe Digital Mozart Edition, and comparing that to my Brietkopf edition, completed and edited by Robert D. Levin, which arrived in the post yesterday. In bar 67 I don’t know that I agree with the scoring of the piano reduction; I would put a concert E in the bass and in the second half of the bar the horn plays a concert B-flat which is lower than any of the piano notes. This is easy enough to change, but it will have to be the piano part that changes. And in bar 128 there is a quaver-and-two-semi-quavers figure which is written as a triplet in the score. Not sure which I’ll do there.

I’m still waiting for the Sikorski edition and the Birdalone edition to arrive. It will be interesting to compare them. I’d love a facsimile of the manuscript but I don’t quite want to spend $125 on it.

2 thoughts on “Mozart KV 370b+371

  1. I’ll try this again logged in…I think the Collected Edition has some facsimile prints in them, if the Trinity library has it?

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