Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major is being reimagined for a new sound installation in the Observatory Hill Rotunda.

Kaldor Public Art Projects has announced that for its next project Albanian-born French artist Anri Sala will create a new sound and sculptural installation at the Observatory Hill Rotunda in Sydney, to be presented free to the public from October 13 to November 5.

^{Anri Sala. Photograph courtesy of Kaldor Public Art Projects}

Titled The Last Resort, the installation will feature a transformation of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K622 – completed in 1791 just two months before he died – and three years after the First Fleet arrived in Sydney. An orchestral recording of Sala’s variation on the concerto, recorded with the Munich Chamber Orchestra, will be played through hidden speakers in the rotunda, which will trigger a response from 38 mechanised snare drums suspended from the ceiling, creating a dialogue between past and present.

Commenting on the installation, Sala said: “I look at this work like a musical artefact that we have thrown in the ocean … the winds, the waves, the water currents take it one way and...