Così fan tutte Reduced Orchestration
Così fan tutte
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Reduced Orchestration: 1111 1000 11111 timp (opt)
Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn, Violin I, Violin II, Viola, Cello, Double Bass, Timpani (optional)
This orchestral reduction is aimed for performance using ten players with the option of adding Mozart’s original timpani for an eleventh player. It can also be performed with a larger string section, and can be played on period instruments.
This reduced orchestration of Mozart’s Così fan tutte is complete and includes all the music from the opera including the less often performed aria of Guglielmo “Rivolgete a lui lo sguardo”.
The score and parts have bar numbers.
Recent performances have taken place in Australia, France, Denmark, the UK and across the USA including Chicago Summer Opera, and University of Florida Opera Theatre with Ocala Symphony Orchestra and Teatro Grattacielo, New York.
Crucially, the pit was not an orchestra shrunk but an orchestra distilled: Jonathan Lyness’s superb reduced orchestration, that quietly renowned craft of turning a symphonic score into a lean and luminous ensemble, remade the score for eleven musicians — flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, percussion, and a nimble string quintet. Here, moreover, lay the evening’s deepest musical pleasure and its most persuasive argument. Mozart’s operatic ensembles have always been chamber music with words — his quartets and sextets are dramatic conversations, every phrase a character arguing, yielding, or overhearing. As scholars of the classical style have long insisted, the miracle of these finales is that counterpoint itself becomes plot. In Lyness’s transparent scoring, one heard exactly that: the sighing suspensions passed hand to hand, the woodwinds gossiping beneath the sisters’ vows, the bassoon’s dry aside landing like a raised eyebrow. Nothing hid in a wash of strings. Consequently, the reduction did not diminish Mozart; it X-rayed him.”
Jonathan Lyness has created a reduced orchestration that cleverly retains the varied colours of the original score.”
Utilizing an orchestral reduction by Jonathan Lyness, the eleven members of the production’s chamber orchestra furnished a surprisingly robust account of the score, proving in the opera’s sparkling Overture that their collective virtuosity rendered their small number inconsequential.”
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