From Bach to broken branches at Mostly Mozart

I loved the performance at the Mostly Mozart Festival I attended last night, not just because it allowed me to bask in a perfect late summer evening and pretend that the academic year was still only a distant shimmer on the horizon. The pieces given were loosely linked by the influence of J.S. Bach on his successors (so the program note); what composer, I might ask rhetorically, has not been influenced by Bach? This could perhaps include the evening's soloist, Stephen Hough, who gave the New York premiere of his own 2010 sonata, "broken branches," in what the program called a pre-concert recital. (I have conflicting feelings about the format of this. I hope it might tempt in some audience members wary of new music, but it also seems to savor faintly of making such works wait around in an antechamber before being formally received into the canon, and the status of main event. Your thoughts on this, Gentle Readers, are welcomed.) The sonata itself I found emotionally involving and evocative. Consisting of linked sections within a single movement, it alludes to Janacek's "On an Overgrown Path" and to John 15. It is hardly too much to say that any composer's note referencing a sixth-century Latin hymn is guaranteed my intellectual enthusiasm. Melodic themes were rearranged, fragmented, questioning each other, eventually emerging through tempests of glissandi to a quieter inquiry that floated off the upper end of the keyboard into silence. Striking throughout was not only the precision of Hough's playing but the variety of colors he drew from the keys. It's quite the week of faith and doubt in music for me!

The evening continued with Bach--foremost composer, perhaps, of faith and doubt--in the form of Mendelssohn's arrangement of JSB's Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major. Andrew Manze led the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra in a performance of considerable beauty, if not brought as close to the bone as Bach can be. I especially appreciated the liveliness with which the dance movements were shaped, giving their dignified progression an appropriately festive feel. The famous air in the second movement was played with affectionate engagement by concertmaster Ruggero Allifranchini.

Following this, Mendelssohn's piano concerto no. 1 was given with surprising and welcome impulsion from the orchestra and Mr. Hough. No too-restrained mannerism here: swift tempi and dynamic give-and-take made this a performance that felt unusually lively and spontaneous. I was, again, struck by the precision of Hough's playing, and his gift of emphasizing the turn (or return) of a musical phrase with a slight shift in volume or tone. Generously, he gave the enthusiastically applauding audience an encore, making Liszt's Träumerei simultaneously more delicate and more profound than I had imagined it as.

By this point, my companion and I were thoroughly pleased... and we hadn't even gotten to the Mozart! The Jupiter symphony was given with verve that did nothing to undermine its nobility. The strings were notable for their use of dynamic nuance, and the cohesiveness and energy of the ensemble were both admirable. The playful woodwind solos, too, were delightful. This performance was Manze's Mostly Mozart debut, but he seemed to have a fine rapport with the orchestra. With the exception of a few cell phone offenders and early leavers (who are these people?) the audience seemed to be engaged as well, hardly sounding consumptive at all, and heartily applauding at the evening's close.

Sneaky photos of post-Mendelssohn bows. Note how happy everyone looks!

Mozart, Beyond: "Jupiter" and Vesperae Solennes de Confessore

Iván Fischer, in a recent interview, offered the following paradoxical definition of Mozart's work: that it lies beyond categorization. This might seem closer to platitude than analysis, but I found myself pondering it as I reflected on Tuesday night's performance. Sacred or secular? Transcendent or exuberantly earthly? Under Fischer's baton, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra approached Mozart's music without an ounce of false reverence, and created a thoroughly involving performance. This was my first time hearing the "Ave verum corpus" in a concert hall. Fischer waited for the audience to settle into (relative) silence before beginning. The orchestra and singers from the Concert Chorale of New York gave an inward, passionate performance. It may be a piece of less than five minutes' duration, but it's a gem, and I was grateful that it wasn't tossed off as a prelude to the body of the concert. (It's one of my favorite "Music at Communion" pieces.) Fischer kept his baton raised to preclude applause, and the organ played during the choristers' withdrawal. We were allowed a few moments of silence and refocusing for the magnificence of Symphony No. 41.

For magnificent it was. Fischer led with unflagging energy (I couldn't help but grin, watching his enthusiasm,) and the orchestra responded in kind. The first movement was propulsive without seeming too weighty, the different sections playing off each other delightfully. Its energy built steadily to the climax; again, a generous pause preceded the transition into the andante. Here, too, I felt the orchestra found the fullness of emotion at the heart of the movement without over-indulgence or caricature. The third movement was splendid without being excessively stately, the contrapuntal glories of the fourth were magnificent, celebratory, festlich... and the whole was more than the sum of its exquisitely composed parts.

I confess to not knowing the Vesperae Solennes de Confessore well; on this hearing, the work seemed to me a gorgeous example of Mozart's talent for making a piece a stronger example of its genre by pushing that genre's boundaries. Fischer led the orchestra in a detail-rich account; tempi were brisk, but not rushed. The Concert Chorale (directed by James Bagwell) contributed confident, responsive singing. The soloists (Lucy Crowe, Helen Karloski, Brian Dougherty, and Scott Wheatley) not only contributed fine individual work, but the colors of their voices blended very nicely in their ensemble passages. This was my first chance to hear Crowe live, and I was most impressed. She had sweet, secure sound, and exhibited impressive control in the agile coloratura demanded by the "Magnificat" as well as the more lyrical, more famous "Laudate Dominum." The triumphant "Amen" was a joyous affirmation. We applauded heartily, and were sent out a little more hopeful than we arrived.

Don Giovanni: A torto di viltate tacciato mai sarò

The man, the myth, the opera: approaching Don Giovanni is no easy task.  But "approach" is too timid a verb for what the Budapest Festival Orchestra did with Mozart's monumental, genre-challenging score, here performed in the Prague version. Under the baton of Iván Fischer, the BFO's interpretation was characterized by brisk tempi and forceful dynamics. The score's humorous touches were handled deftly, but this reading emphasized the passionate seriousness of Mozart's work. Especially noticeable to me in the strings was a fearless romanticism, unexpected but very welcome. From my balcony seat, there was a balance issue from time to time, but with an orchestral performance this full-blooded and thrilling, I minded hardly at all (and less, perhaps, than I should have.)

Budapest, Palace of Arts/Zsuzsanna Peto

Jessica Waldoff, in Recognition in Mozart's Operas, has called Don Giovanni the most "discussed, deliberated, and disputed" of Mozart's operas. Elsewhere, Andrew Steptoe observes that Giovanni "ranges from transcendent demonic hero to trivial philanderer, and critical opinion has been equally divided." The staging of the festival performances, designed by Iván Fischer, acknowledges the ambiguities of the work: actors, clad and painted in white, shaped their bodies to define the set and to become props, as well as serving as dancers and chorus. According to Fischer, this choice was made to represent the realm of the opera from the central character's perspective: Don Giovanni's world is defined by bodies; I thought this minimalist approach worked very well. The lack of scene-changes kept the pace of the drama relentless, its episodes clearly related in logical, inexorable succession. The action of the piece is quite literally set in motion when the seducer, clad as an adventurer in a black cape, tips a statue reminiscent of Bernini's Apollo and Daphne onto the Commendatore, fatally wounding him. Another advantage of the staging was that it diffused the potential for skepticism at the Commendatore's appearance ("It's only a white costume/makeup...") Quite obviously, that is not the point. When the Commendatore does at last appear, the impossible apparition is composed of all the actors, who had previously formed Don Giovanni's chair and dinner table; his entire society, his entire environment, is arrayed against him.

Cara ed amabile

I should be hoarding my stipend and beefing up lecture notes in these last weeks of summer... but the Mostly Mozart festival has begun, and I could not resist its siren call!  As always in the wake of these reckless concert-related decisions, I'm inexpressibly glad I went; surely lecture notes will be the better for my brain and heart having absorbed some Mozart beforehand?   The program notes were unusually lively, as well as informative, maybe stretching a little too far in its attempts to convince us that all the evening's music shared a uniting theme both natural and profound, but still good.  Jane Moss, the festival's director, claims in the program booklet that it is hard to imagine "a more sublime and rewarding way to experience summer in New York than celebrating the genius and inspiration of Mozart," a sentiment which, while perhaps overly fulsome, I find hard to argue with.