Mozart, the joker and the genius

Budapest Festival Orchestra

Most Proms are a miscellany, and none the worse for that. But there’s a special pleasure to be had from Proms that wrap us in the world of a single composer, and explore its less familiar aspects.

This all-Mozart programme might have been cunningly designed to show off the composer’s emotional range, beginning with the gentle comedy of the aria “Per Questa bella mano”. The text’s plea of undying amorous constancy seemed sincere enough on the page, but Mozart clearly didn’t take it very seriously. He surrounded the vocal melody (eloquently sung by bass Hanno Müller-Brachmann) with an absurdly virtuoso double-bass part, tossed off here by Zsolt Fejérvári.

The concert moved by degrees towards Mozart’s solemn side. His Clarinet Concerto, played here on a proper old-fashioned, deep-toned basset horn, came up fresh and new. Soloist Ákos Ács did this with unshowy, graceful musicality, which was mysterious and eloquent because it was so simple on the surface.

Much the same could be said of the orchestral playing, which in the closing performance of the Requiem took on a deep, inward expressivity. There were no distracting “period” mannerisms, and conductor Iván Fischer stuck with the completion of the Requiem by Süssmayr. Its superiority to the various modern scholarly completions seemed especially evident in this performance.

Fischer’s tempos were often unfashionably slow, but the phrasing he coaxed from the orchestra was so shapely that they never seemed sluggish and the choral singing from the Collegium Vocale Gent was heartbreaking in its tenderness.

At the end, Fischer led chorus and orchestra to a quiet final chord that was startling in its total refusal of the grand manner. He got his reward, in the stunned silence of the audience.