A final fling with Amadeus

Even the biggest, best birthday parties must come to an end.

For the past year, the classical musical world has been celebrating the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birth. Concerts by the hundreds, sets of packaged CDs by the score, and piles of books have celebrated the Austrian composer.

Spokane’s Allegro: Baroque and Beyond series has been no exception.

A year ago, David Dutton and his Allegro cohorts soared into the Mozart year with Georges Bizet’s little-known arrangements of excerpts from “Don Giovanni.”

Friday’s Allegro concert at the Bing Crosby Theater will bid farewell to the festivities with arrangements from “The Magic Flute,” the “Linz” Symphony and the Serenade in C minor.

Performers will include oboist Dutton, flutist Gale Coffee, violinists Rachel Dorfman and Margaret Bowers, violists Nicholas Carper and Kendall Feeney, cellist Cheryl Carney, French horns Roger Logan and Margaret Wilds, and pianist Yi-Chun Chen.

The concert will introduce a newcomer to Allegro’s musical instrument collection: a copy of a fortepiano built shortly after Mozart’s death by Johan Lodewijk Dulcken, the Flemish builder of harpsichords and pianos.

“Yi-Chun and I selected this instrument on a recent trip to New England, and it just arrived here in Spokane on Jan. 4,” Dutton says. “The Dulcken original is in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and the copy was made by Philip Belt.”

Though Friday’s concert will be the first time the instrument will be heard live in Spokane, several local record collectors will have already heard the instrument. It was used for many of the pioneer fortepiano recordings made by the American pianist Malcolm Bilson.

Chen, who is Dutton’s wife, will play one of Mozart’s most frequently performed compositions, his Twelve Variations on “Ah! Vous dirai-je, Maman.”

“Most people will recognize this French folk song as ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,’ ” Dutton says.

“We selected the music for this program to show music from Mozart’s early, middle and late periods – if you can divide a short life of only 35 years in such a manner,” he adds.

“From his early period comes the wonderful Divertimento, K. 251, written when he was only 20 years old, as a birthday present for his sister Nannerl.”

Middle-period Mozart will be represented by the variations played by Chen and by movements from the “Linz” Symphony arranged for piano with the accompaniment of flute, violin and cello by Mozart’s most famous student, Johann Nepomuk Hummel.

Hummel’s arrangement of the Overture to “The Magic Flute” and Mozart’s own arrangement for quintet of his C minor Serenade will show works from the final years of the composer’s life.

“Mozart’s fondness for this work is obvious from its re-release along with with two newly composed quintets,” Dutton says. “We will perform it with oboe and strings because the original first violin part is virtually identical with the oboe part of the serenade.”

On Friday at 7:15 p.m., Dutton will present a pre-concert talk on the sound of pianos from their earliest invention through the beginning of the 19th century. It will include recorded examples made during Dutton’s and Chen’s trip to New England.