Less Than Magical Mozart in Pasadena

By Truman C. Wang
Saturday, May 11, 2002

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, circa 1779

PASADENA, CALIF – Perhaps it was inevitable that, toward the end of  a long and grueling season, the orchestra began to show its fatigue.  Or, more distressingly, the disarming charm and simplicity of Mozart's entertaining Tafelmusik (vis-à-vis the Von Dohnanyi or Shostakovich in the last concert) had instilled a sense of complacency among the musicians.  In any event, last Saturday night's all-Mozart program by the Pasadena Symphony was not one which the serious connoisseur shall remember with undiluted pleasure.

The orchestra was predictably at its best in Mozart's late work, Adagio and Fugue in c minor (K.546).  The long, sustained chords in the Adagio recall the Romantic world of Don Giovanni (which premiered a year prior).  The double basses intone the cantus firmus of the Fugue, to which the higher strings add contrapuntal voices to achieve Sturm und Drang on a monumental scale.  The playing by the Pasadena Symphony struck an ideal balance between grace and solemnity that was wholly convincing.

Far less convincing, however, was the Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat for violin and viola (K.364).  This rarely heard gem requires a virtuosi orchestra and two soloists who can play off of each other as well as with each other.  The Turkish-born Kavafian sisters seemed hell-bent on outdoing each other and often outrunning the orchestra as well.  Never mind Mozart's harsh accusations of the violinist Antonio Brunetti ("ill-bred, coarse, a disgrace to his employer and myself"), who premiered the work in 1779 with the 23-year-old composer as the violist.

The opening bars of the Allegro maestoso, with richly divided violas and a grand crescendo, signal the newfound Mannheim-influenced harmonies and the end of Mozart's Salzburg period.  The style is broader, the feeling richer. The orchestra is no mere support, but a highly articulate participant that maintains a close rapport with the viola and violin soloists.  In this case, the rapport proved to be nearly non-existent, as the Kavafian sisters took some serious liberties with rhythm and phrasing against a polished backdrop of orchestral playing.  Only toward the end of the elegiac C-minor Andante was there a hint of genuine feeling, in the firmly articulated dotted rhythm and the poignant orchestral coda.  The spirited final Allegro, alas, plummeted again into the helter-skelter of the opening, and heard more faulty intonations and smudged notes from the Kavafian sisters.  That upward slide, or glissando, on the violin toward the middle of the Allegro was a shocker, a stylistic solecism that had me nearly fall out of my seat!

With the death of his beloved mother in July of 1778, Mozart was no longer content with writing 'entertainment' music, and frequently imbued it with symphonic grandeur and highly chromatic harmonies, as heard in the "Posthorn" Serenade in D-major (K.320).  The thin line separating the serenade and the symphony during this period is but one aspect of Mozart's ambiguous nature that I find endlessly fascinating.

The seven movements of the D-major Serenade are comprised of a pair of movements with solo woodwinds, a pair of minuets, an andantino for strings, and outer movements which Mozart instructed to be played "in a fiery manner and the finale as fast as possible".  As expected, Maestro Mester and his orchestra excelled in the darker emotional veins of the minor-key Andantino and the opulent romp and pomp of the outer movements.  The use of cellos and double basses, absent in the original scoring, further added to the grandeur of the piece.  Intonation seemed to be a problem on this night, and here the woodwinds and the solo French horn (which substituted the original valveless posthorn in the second minuet) were all suspect.  In the Concertante (No. 3), the solo flute and oboe engaged in a graceful pas de deux without casting any magical spell on these ears.

This concert can be heard on K-Mozart (105.1FM) on Sunday, June 2, 8:00pm.

Truman C. Wang is editor of Classical Voice.

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