Sinfonia in A

Dwarfed by the reputation of his peerless son and the recipient of much spiteful and ill-informed criticism over the past 200 years, the reputation of Leopold Mozart (1719-1787) has suffered more than that most of his professional contemporaries. He was an acute and sardonic observer of men and morals, a superlative critic and teacher and a fine composer whose works circulated well beyond the confines of Salzburg and made the name Mozart famous before it became immortal. The Sinfonia A1 survives in a unique source copied at Lambach during the 1750s although it is known to have existed in other locations which suggests that like other symphonies by Leopold Mozart A1 had a respectable if limited distribution. It is a mark of Leopold’s ‘international’ reputation that his instrumental music found a ready audience throughout most of German-speaking Europe. Scored for strings alone, A1 is small in scale and limited in its expressive ambitions but its fluency and structural polish reveal at every turn the deft hand of an experienced and talented composer.