With an outpouring of performances, recordings and books to mark

the bicentenary of his death, this was Mozart Year.

from Solti

These things are fortuitous, of course, but the bicentenary of Mozart has arrived at an interesting moment of change and possibility in the way his music is performed. Two decades ago the celebrations would have been safely in the hands of standard chamber orchestras—the London Mozart Players, the English Chamber Orchestra, the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields—all of them performing a repertory from Bach to Stravinsky without worrying too much about changes in instrumental technique along the way. Now, when the South Bank holds its Mozart Now festival in the late summer, the performing ensembles will be chosen from among those specializing in period style: the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the London Classical Players, the English Baroque Soloists, the English Concert, the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century. And the first of these groups has again been engaged by Glyndebourne, this time for two operas.

To see this as a Sarastrian victory for the forces of light against the historically unaware and, of course, totally inauthentic ways of the recent past would be easy, and this conflictory metaphor has certainly been used by some proponents of period style. Allies in aesthetic battles, however, tend to be fighting for quite different ends, and the result is usually something altogether new and unexpected rather than a victory for either side.