July 20, 2009: Virtual Mozart

It has been a while since I paid a visit to the Berlin Philharmonic's Digital Concert Hall;  but, since this is the time of the Midsummer Mozart Festival, it seemed like an appropriate occasion to experience this particular ensemble's treatment of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  As I reviewed the Concert Hall Archives, however, I realized that the Berlin repertoire is now so diverse that there are few opportunities to hear Mozart.  Nevertheless, there is an all-Mozart program conducted by Trevor Pinnock that was recorded on October 10, 2008 that should satisfy just about any need for a "Mozart fix."  The soloist is pianist Maria João Pires performing the K. 271 E-flat major piano concerto, flanked on either side by a G minor symphony.  The program opened with the K 183 symphony and concluded with K. 550, making for a tonal plan for the entire concert that makes a non-standard diagonal "round trip" on Arnold Schoenberg's "map" of tonal progressions.

When I wrote about the Fazioili pianos used in this year's Midsummer Mozart Festival, I was particularly taken by how accommodating they were to the light touch necessary for  the K. 365 two-piano concerto.  Pires showed equal command of that light touch on the usual "industrial strength" Steinway (which, on the basis of the camera angles, is my best guess at the piano that was used), as well as an awareness of every instrument in the reduced orchestra that Pinnock had selected.  Mozart covered a broad range of emotional dispositions in this concerto, covering the playful, the accommodating, and even the meditative.  Soloist, conductor, and ensemble followed him down all of these paths, displaying each of them to the audience in their proper light, so to speak.  Pires also drew upon an infrequently-heard cadenza (her own?) for the final movement, whose seriousness enhanced the comic side of the "minuet interruption" towards the end of the movement.  This work preceded the two-piano concerto by about two years and offers some of the first impressions of Mozart pursuing some adventuresome experiments with his work.

Both G minor symphonies approach their forward movement with a sense of urgency but in markedly different ways.  Pinnock applied several interesting strategies to highlight those differences.  Much of his attention in the early symphony seems to have been directed towards changing the articulation of passages that the notation indicated as simple repetition.  In the later symphony, on the other hand, Mozart keeps pulling out differentiating factors with awe-inspiring rapidity;  so it was up to Pinnock to make sure we could hear all of his tricks with the utmost clarity.  One of my music teachers use to emphasize that the hardest part of the K. 550 symphony is the first measure, with the onset of its almost hesitant theme.  Pinnock decided to emphasize the clarity of the accompaniment (which is a straightforward pulse), using it as a well-defined framework from which the theme emerges as a new voice.  Anyone familiar with the vocal repertoire knows that this strategy makes perfect sense;  but how many conductors take such a "vocal" approach to Mozart's best-known symphony?

In all fairness I should observe that none of these works will be on the second program of the Midsummer Mozart Festival.  Nevertheless, my general axiom still holds:  The best way to listen to Mozart is to take all opportunities to listen to Mozart.  This "virtual program" will do much to orient the ears to the repertoire of the Festival simply by providing a framework for the next set of offerings.  The virtual may never replace the physical, but it can certainly enhance appreciation of the physical.