The ballet music for Idomeneo, rarely heard with the opera, and still more rarely without it, consists of a fine, full-length Chaconne in the traditional French manner (not a ground-bass piece but a triple-metre dance, in this case with a Larghetto middle section), which is joined to a pas seul written for the ballet-master at the premiere and a brief concluding ensemble dance; there is also a gavotte “for the Cretan women”, which may have belonged at the end of Act 1, and a passepied supposed to have been part of the Act 3 finale. In addition there is a Passecaille in E flat which Mozart excised, probably intended in the first place to follow the gavotte. All this is music well worth rescuing. Christopher Hogwood directs the Chaconne with plenty of vitality, catching happily the mood of the celebratory finale (there is a bit too much of noisy D major junketing at the end, but that’s Mozart’s fault); I thought the Larghetto a little slow and heavy (some of it is rather thickly scored), but the little passepied is done with much delicacy. The gavotte (which Mozart remembered when composing the finale of the Piano Concerto, K503) is played with much charm and I enjoyed the exceptionally rare opportunity to hear the Passecaille, which is not really vintage material but has some attractive scoring including clarinets.
The Posthorn Serenade, the last of Mozart’s big Salzburg serenades (unless you reckon in the Haffner Symphony, designed for a similar purpose), done here with its attendant marches, goes with a splendid swing to its rhythms, with the quick outer movements as crisp and lively as one could wish. The solo posthorn in the second minuet has a noble and resonant ring. The soloists in the inserted two-movement concertante are pairs of flutes, oboes and bassoons, sensitive to the tender expression of the Andante grazioso, and especially the principal flute and oboe, delightfully neat and playful in the rondo. The heart of the work, however, is the D minor Andantino that follows the concertante, a movement surprisingly – for a serenade – sombre, with its dark, low-pitched scoring (bassoons and middle strings), its minor mode, accents and chromaticisms. Perhaps the days of the carefree serenade were over for Mozart by 1779. The careful shaping and the intensity of Hogwood’s reading do not contradict that view. In keeping with contemporary Salzburg practice, Hogwood uses no cellos in the serenade; Mozart’s scoring (and especially his management of the bassoon parts) of course accommodated this and the result is entirely convincing.'