Classical Music | Clarinet Music

Recorded on 10/30/2019, uploaded on 04/02/2020

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Un'aura amorosa from Così fan tutte, arranged by Sam Boutris

Written just a year before his death, Mozart’s 1790 Così fan tutte chronicles a ridiculous web of fiancée-swapping, opening with a wager between two lovestruck soldiers and a more cynical onlooker, who hatches a ruse to prove the soldiers’ betrotheds to be fickle lovers. As advertised by the opera’s title, sometimes translated as “All Women Do It”, the soldiers’ confidence at the outset is misplaced. But when a starry-eyed Fernando sings his tender aria “Un’aura amorosa”, he is full of trust and devotion — if only for the moment. One of several masterpieces in miniature that lavish Mozart’s score, “Un’aura amorosa” croons with the heartfelt simplicity that began to emerge as a new style at the tail end of the composer’s life. It shares its sunny, understated beauty with The Magic Flute and his Clarinet Concerto of the following year, and thus seems at home in the mellow voice of the clarinet, which Mozart held especially dear at the end of his life.    Notes by Graeme Steele Johnson

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.