July 25, 2009: Midsummer Mozart Festival, Program II

Last night George Cleve presented the second and final program of this year's Midsummer Mozart Festival at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  Two concertos again formed the central portion of the program, flanked on either side by a major symphony, each from a different period from the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  The program proceeded in roughly chronological order.
This means that the evening began with the K. 201 (186a) A major symphony, composed by the teenaged Mozart in 1774.  This was his first significant effort in the four-movement symphonic form, departing from the three-movement convention of most of his earlier symphonies.  It also has one of the most challenging openings, demanding an understated downward octave leap as its first gesture.  I have heard this opening fumble in both directions, either coming on too strong to defeat the piano dynamic or so understated that it is barely audible.  These days it is the sort of composition that thrives better in a studio where the equipment can do all the work.  However, Cleve had no trouble finding that middle ground from which the music makes its presence known with the subtlety that the score demands:

Once Mozart establishes his introduction, the teenaged show-off kid takes over;  and he uses the four movements of the symphony to explore a diverse palette of inventive gestures.  It is almost as if he decided to "play" the orchestra with the same virtuosity he brought to his keyboard performances;  and both Cleve and his orchestra were there, right on top of things, each time Mozart pulled a new rabbit out of the hat.

The remainder of the program brought us to the later period of Mozart's life, beginning with his 1784 F major piano concerto, K. 459, later called "Coronation" when it was performed for the coronation of Emperor Leopold II, who was also honored with La Clemenza di Tito, whose overture began last week's Festival concert.  [Correction added after initial release:  The title "Coronation" was applied to the D major K. 537 concerto, which, like K. 459, was performed on the occasion of Leopold's coronation.  I discovered this error through Jerry Kuderna's review of this concert for San Francisco Classical Voice.]  While the program promised another encounter with a Fazioli piano, the instrument was clearly marked as a Steinway;  but soloist Seymour Lipkin commanded such a light touch from his instrument to remind us all that the pianist always matters more than the piano.  Last week we had younger keyboard performers offering us the music of a younger Mozart;  this week we had a pianist with far more extensive experience approaching Mozart's penultimate piano concerto with all the youthful energy of his earlier works.

The intermission was followed by the third of Mozart's four horn concertos, K. 447 in E-flat major (although there is some debate as to when this concerto was actually written).  The soloist was David Sprung, principal horn in the Festival orchestra.  Here again we have a playful Mozart writing for a horn virtuoso he knew well, Joseph Leutgeb.  As was the case with last week's flute concerto, the flamboyance of Mozart's solo piano work may have been missing;  but he knew how to rise to the technical skills of his soloist.  This is definitely a showy piece of work, and Sprung deftly negotiated Mozart's technical demands to bring the horn the attention it deserves.

The evening (and Festival) concluded, appropriately enough, with Mozart's final symphony, the C major K. 551, later given the name "Jupiter."  This required the most orchestral resources of the evening, supporting the strings with one flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, and timpani.  As was the case with last week's "Haffner" symphony, this is a work of extensive harmonic and contrapuntal imagination, climaxing with some of Mozart's richest counterpoint in the coda of the final movement.  Cleve and his ensemble delivered all of this detail with both clarity and energy, bring everything to an exhilarating conclusion.

In addition to the works listed on the program, the horn concerto was preceded by a Mozart rarity, the fragment of a concert aria for soprano, strings, and two horns, "Die neugeborne Ros' entzückt."  This work has a Köchel catalog entry of K.365a (Anh.11a), but cannot be viewed through the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe Web site.  The autograph was discovered in 1996 and consists only of a fragment;  and Cleve decided to perform this fragment, without any subsequent editing to flesh it out, with soprano Deborah Berioli, thus providing an element of novelty to those who thought the offerings on the program were too familiar.

July 18, 2009: Midsummer Mozart Festival, Program I

The first program of this year's Midsummer Mozart Festival, under the direction of George Cleve, was presented last night in San Francisco at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  The offerings consisted of two concertos embraced by an opening overture and a concluding symphony.  This was the Festival orchestra's first appearance in the Conservatory Concert Hall, and the setting was as conducive to them as it has been in the past to Symphony Parnassus.

The overture was from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's final opera, La Clemenza di Tito, K. 621.  The opera was composed as part of the festivities surrounding the coronation of the Austrian Emperor Leopold II;  and this may explain why, after his many ventures into new approaches to musical drama, Mozart settled back on the traditional formality of an opera seria, drawing upon a libretto by Pietro Metastasio.  The overture, however, anticipates a higher sense of drama than one usually expects from Metastasio.  Energy bursts forth with the intensity of the more verismo Don Giovanni (K. 527).  The action that ensures after the curtain rises on the first act may not be as intense as the midnight-seduction-gone-wrong of the earlier opera;  but this later overture definitely gets the juices flowing.

In this case, however, the metaphorical curtain rose on the concerto for two pianos in E-flat major, K. 365 (also listed as K. 316a).  This was composed in Salzburg in 1779 for performance by Mozart and his sister Nannerl.  Brother and sister had already established a reputation for playing four-hand piano music in a variety of European salon settings;  and the spirit of those four-hand works lives on in this larger-scale concerto, as does the tradition of it being a "sibling act."  Katia and Marielle Labèque have performed it with the San Francisco Symphony;  and last night it was performed by the Korean sisters, Yong Jean and Yong Sung Park.  Also featured were two Fazioli pianos, provided courtesy of Piedmont Pianos in Oakland.

For those unfamiliar with this brand, Fazioli is the latest in the line of "elite" pianos.  Among the instruments distinguishing features, the Piedmont advertisement in the program book observes:

At the heart of each FAZIOLI piano is a soundboard made from the same red spruce trees from the Val di Fiemme region in Italy that Antonius Stradivarius used for his legendary violins.

One may debate whether or not what is good for a violin is also good for a piano, but these were definitely suitable instruments for the occasion.  The Park sisters approached the music with a light touch, absolutely necessary to keep one instrument from overshadowing the other;  and the Faziolis delivered that light sound with crystal clarity.  There was also a uniformity of sonority across the two instruments.  It is unlikely that the two instruments played by the Mozarts had similar uniformity;  but, if this concerto was intended as an escalation of four-hand music to concerto form, there is good reason to assume that Mozart had such uniformity in mind.  This may well have been one of those cases where modern technology could do better justice to the music than more "authentic" instruments.

The second concerto on the program was the G major flute concerto, K. 313 (285c).  This was composed shortly before the two-piano concerto while Mozart was in Mannheim.  Some of Mozart's most interesting sonorities come from the wind family, and this concerto is no exception.  The string parts are supplemented by only two oboes and two horns, giving the soloist opportunities to blend with the orchestra winds to achieve some striking colorations.  At the same time Mozart has not skimped on opportunities for virtuosity, even if the cadenzas do not go to the sorts of lengths that Mozart allowed himself in his piano concertos.  The soloist for the evening was Maria Tamburrino, principal flute in the Festival orchestra.  Her familiarity with the ensemble may be one explanation for that excellent blend of sonorities that distinguished the performance.

The evening concluded with one of the more familiar of Mozart's symphonies, his D major "Haffner," K. 385.  As with the opening overture, Cleve provided a crisp and energetic reading from which all the details of Mozart's harmonies and counterpoint emerged in a clear light.  As a result, the familiar took on the freshness of originality, coming to even the most seasoned ears as if for the first time.  The drive of the final Presto movement was truly energizing, fortifying those of us who had to walk home through the Van Ness Wind Tunnel!

June 30, 2009: Mozart chamber music for piano and strings

The final preview event for the Midsummer Mozart Festival in the programs for the Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary's Cathedral presented Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart through two examples of his chamber music at its sunniest.  These were compositions for piano and two (the B-flat major piano trio, K. 502) and three (the E-flat major piano quartet, K. 493) strings, both of which were composed in Vienna in the same calendar year, 1786.  The ensemble consisted of (yet again!) pianist Miles Graber, violinist Mariya Borozina, cellist Eric Sung, and violist Caroline Lee.

For all the ways in which these two compositions are "proximal" (in both time and instrumentation), they offer a perfect demonstration of how Mozart could find diversity in "surface level similarity."  K. 493 is, in many respects, almost like a "concerto for piano and very small orchestra" (a phrase I have previously applied to Johannes Brahms' approach to the piano quartet ensemble).  K. 502, on the other hand, is somewhat like a conversation with a multiplicity of conversants beyond the number of instruments.  Thus, while both violin and cello are given ample solo turns, they also play together as a single "contrapuntal instrument."  Similarly, the piano offers both accompanied melody and counterpoint, in addition to contributing as a continuo for the entire ensemble (including itself?).  Thus the two works, placed side by side, turn out to offer radically different listening experiences, emphasizing once again that even the most seasoned listeners never seem to run out of reasons for listening to Mozart.  Could there have been a better way to end the preview offerings in preparation for the Midsummer Mozart concerts themselves, which will begin in two weeks?

June 2, 2009: The second Midsummer Mozart Festival preview

The second preview event for the Midsummer Mozart Festival was presented in today's Noontime Concerts™ offering at Old St. Mary's Cathedral.  While the first concert had featured the string ensemble, along with two horns, in a performance of the K. 334 divertimento in D major, the emphasis today was strictly on clarinets, bassoons, and horns.  The provenance of the first work on the program is a bit perplexing.  The program listed it as the fourth divertimento in K. 299.  However, Louis Biancolli's Mozart Handbook lists a collection of five divertimenti with Anhang numbers 229 and 229a, while the Wikipedia entry has these divertimenti listed in the sixth revision (1964) of the Köchel catalog as K. 439b.  Both of these entries date the work as having been composed in 1783 in Vienna.  Meanwhile, the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe lists the five divertimenti as K. 439b, providing a score for three basset-horns in F major (also indicating the alternate Anhang numbers) and dating composition as between 1783 and 1788.  (The Biancolli listing indicates that they were all in B-flat major and scored for clarinets and bassoon.)  In the midst of all of this confusion, the one thing that seems to be certain is that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed these divertimenti for the brothers Anton and Johann Stadler, both of whom excelled at both clarinet and basset-horn.

Today's performance was given by two clarinets (Mark Brandenburg and Karla Avila) and bassoon (Carla Wilson), consistent with Biancolli's Anhang listing, as well as the recording available in the Brilliant Classics collection of Mozart's complete works (which, incidentally, includes a sixth divertimento that begins with an original rondo followed by two arrangements of arias from Le Nozze di Figaro and two from Don Giovanni).  One of its distinguishing features is the presence of two slow movements;  but, as was the case with K. 334, Mozart saves some of his most adventurous writing for the trio of the Menuetto, which, in any other setting, would be taken as the most predictable of formal structures.  Also important is that all three of the voices are given "focal" status at some point in the course of the work, leading one to wonder whether or not the work really was originally composed for three "equal" basset-horns.

There are also two performing versions of the second work on the program, the K. 375 serenade in E-flat major.  Mozart composed it on October 15, 1781 for St. Theresa's Day for two clarinets (again Brandenburg and Avila), two horns (David Sprung and Cameron Kopf), and two bassoons (Wilson joined by Alice Benjamin).  He then revised it in July of 1782 to include two oboe parts.  As my listing of personnel indicates, the sextet version was given at this performance.  Sprung observed in his introductory remarks that both versions are so well balanced that it is hard to tell that one is a revision of the other.  The Allegro Finale may be the most familiar movement of this work;  but Mozart is again at his most adventurous in a Menuetto trio (this time the second of two).  Again, this is a work in which no voice is insignificant;  and the whole concert's "all winds" take on Mozart offered a refreshing perspective of music that should be heard more often.

May 19, 2009: Playfully aggravating Mozart

It is hard to recognize seasonal change from the weather in San Francisco, but one sure sign of spring is the beginning of preview events for the Midsummer Mozart Festival in the programs for the Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary's Cathedral.  These concerts do not preview the works that will be performed at the two concerts that the Midsummer Mozart Festival offers in July.  Rather, they get the ear in the proper spirit for listening to the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart both through performances by members of the Midsummer Mozart Festival Orchestra and through the informative remarks that George Cleve offers to the Old St. Mary's audience.

The first of these events took place today and consisted of only one composition, the K. 334 divertimento in D major.  Since this is one of Mozart's longest orchestral compositions, running about 40 minutes, Cleve was brief in his remarks, noting that the work was from his Salzburg period and that the first violin part was demanding enough to qualify almost as material for a violin concerto (which is why a few measures from that part have been reproduced above).  What Cleve did not mention was that this work was composed in 1779, which was a time when Mozart's relationship with the Archbishop of Salzburg was growing increasingly strained and Mozart was champing at the bit to get out from under the Archbishop's service.

From this point of view, this divertimento should be appreciated for not only its virtuosity but also its tendency to get under the skin of those who liked their music more predictable and more suited to either an incidental capacity or background entertainment.  In other words Mozart may have been looking for ways to provoke the Archbishop into letting him go elsewhere (like Vienna).  This strategy is most evident in the second of the two Menuetto movements of this divertimento, whose principal section sounds ordinary enough but whose two trios flaunt their unorthodoxy in rhythm, melody, harmony, and phrasing—defying listeners like the Archbishop to treat it as innocuous wallpaper.  This is Mozart mastering the fine art of being playful and aggravating at the same time, and that quality makes this divertimento one of his most memorable gems.

As he always does at the Midsummer Mozart concerts, Cleve had no trouble getting into the spirit of this work;  and his ensemble followed him in there with evident relish (evident in that one can often see when both performers and conductor are clearly enjoying their work).  One way to appreciate that spirit is through an observation that Yehudi Menuhin made in his memoir, Unfinished Journey, about what his own teacher, George Enescu, had to say about Mozart:

Mozart's music, he [Enescu] said, was essentially a music of syllable and gesture;  when I saw it presented dynamically and could visualize the situation behind each phrase, I would understand that even his orchestral and chamber works were built on the human drama and would play (or mime) it very much better.

Today's performance demonstrated this approach, and it bodes well for the two additional preview events to be offered at Old St. Mary's on June 2 and 30, not to mention the two Festival concerts themselves, each of which will be given at four separate venues in the Bay Area.