Revisiting a favorite work of mine today, because sometimes you need to remind yourself that once in the greatest of whiles, someone on this planet really does achieve perfection. Of course, perfection is a more reasonable goal if you happen to be, say, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. For the rest of us, it’s something to aim at in hopes of just getting better. For Mozart, “perfection” is what happens on a startlingly regular basis. That’s what made him Mozart, after all.
I find myself liking performance by school groups and youth orchestras more and more these days, because what you might lack a little bit in polish, you tend to make up for in fresh liveliness of the musicmaking. I have a greater appreciation for flawed passion of late. Here is a chamber orchestra, with soloists, from the New England Conservatory, playing Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante for violin, viola, and orchestra in E-flat major.