The passage of two centuries has found little to challenge the supremacy of Mozart’s concertos in the repertoire for solo wind instruments: flute, oboe, clarinet; bassoon, and horn. He wrote them, mostly, to amuse the soloists—noble dilettantes on the one hand and his instrumentalist friends on the other—and their invited guests. As a result their outlook is typically unperturbed, their scale smallish. The sequence of movements is conventional: a concerto-sonata first movement with orchestral ritornello, an Andante, and a rondo.The usual orchestration is for strings with pairs of oboes and horns, but without clarinets, trumpets, and timpani—the “light” orchestra of the time. All are in major keys.

Mozart composed his Bassoon Concerto in June 1774, when he was 18, possibly at the request of the aristocratic amateur Baron von Dürnitz. The solo part percolates, in the first movement, through an expansive main theme and a second subject of typical bassoon passagework that takes care to descend now and then to the instrument’s lowest notes. (Despite its ungainly appearance and unholy association with irritable grandfathers, the bassoon is a remarkably agile instrument.) The Andante may well remind you of “Porgi amor,” the Countess’s aria at the beginning of act II of The Marriage of Figaro, which it precedes by many years; the third movement is a rondo in the minuet style, with the solo part beginning in courtly triplet arpeggiations and then becoming markedly faster and more intricate. Throughout Mozart revels in the bassoon’s ability to bounce with ease over intervals wider than an octave: Vivaldi did this, too, with several dozen concertos for solo bassoon, but in Mozart we find, even as early as 1774, the ideals of Viennese sonata form controlling the compositional process.

For bassoon solo; oboes I-II, horns I-II; strings

Composed 1774 in Salzburg; lost manuscript inscribed “Salzburg, 4 June 1774.” Details of first performance unknown.

Published Offenbach: J. A. André, 1805. Inexpensive score: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Concerti for Wind Instruments in Full Score (New York: Dover, 1986)

Duration: about 20 minutes