Our principal bass clarinettist Norbert Möller on his relationship to the main work of this chamber music matinee: “Mozart's Gran Partita is magnificent music – it is a great pleasure to play, and the instrumentation is unique. The two basset horns bring a very special timbre to the piece. Mozart loved this instrument between the clarinet and the bass clarinet, and used it frequently. My part in the concert will be the second basset horn.

When we took part in the ARD competition in Munich with the Berlin Wind Quintet in 1985, we used our stay to watch the Mozart film Amadeus, which had just been released in cinemas and which thoroughly shook up our orderly school knowledge of the composer: Mozart's life was staged as an exaggerated story, his relationship with Antonio Salieri portrayed as a crime drama. In an outstanding scene, 30 years after Mozart's death, the elderly Salieri talks about the Adagio of the Gran Partita:

‘The score looked like nothing. The beginning, so simple, almost ridiculous. Just a pulsation, bassoons, basset horns – like a rusty squeezebox. But then, suddenly, high above, a lone oboe, a single note, unshakeable above everything else, until a clarinet takes it up, in a phrase of such heavenly sweetness! That was no composition by a circus monkey! I had never heard music like that before. Full of deepest longing; such an insatiable longing that I trembled and it seemed to me as if I were hearing the voice of God.’

And when I hear this very Adagio, or even get to play it, it sends a chill down my spine.”