Andante sostenuto

Although the Italian composer Nino Rota possessed a very personal style of his own, he was also a highly skilled imitator of different musical styles and gestures. This ability is seen particularly in his film scores, though it also appears in his other writing; his ballet Le Molière imaginaire, for example, creates an ironic and witty atmosphere through the incorporation of isolated idioms taken from the French suite form.

Rota’s Andante sostenuto also benefits from this treatment: although the composer uses none of Mozart’s actual musical material, the movement is closely modelled on his tonal language. Rota created his Andante as a bridge linking the Allegro and Rondo of Mozart’s Horn Concerto in D major K 142, a central movement not present in the original piece. In the process, and almost 180 years later, he also created a stylistically uniform Mozart-Rota concert piece for the French horn.