Sinfonia in D

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 D15 is an interesting and impressive work whose orchestration includes a pair of horns. Leopold’s sensitivity to timbre and texture within the cycle of movements is apparent in his employment of unison violins in the central Andante as a contrast to the full scoring of the opening Allegro and the Minuet but it is also to be seen in smaller details, often inaudible to the listener, such as the ‘hocketing’ effect in the first movement in which the two violin parts alternate a top A (later D) when the figure could easily have been assigned to a single part.