MAINLY MOZART LAUNCHES SEASON WITH POLISH, ENERGY
San Diego needs summer, and summer needs outdoor music. Friday night, established favorite Mainly Mozart Festival delivered, launching its summer season with a sun-dappled evening of Mozart and Beethoven.
In a mirror-image of programming, Mainly Mozart's Music Director Michael Francis and All-Star Orchestra began their summer residency with the last great work Mozart completed: his Clarinet Concerto, K. 622. This is a work virtually without peer in the 18th century, owing largely to the newness of the clarinet as a solo instrument.
Mozart's clarinet works — the Concerto and Quintet chief among them — all owe their genesis to Anton Stadler, a clarinet virtuoso whose friendship with Mozart proved especially fortuitous. Stadler was a master of the clarinet and basset horn — an early antecedent of the modern clarinet — and was a co-inventor of the basset clarinet, the instrument for which Mozart originally wrote his concerto.
Despite the temptation to consider the concerto — finished just months before Mozart's death — a swan song, this is a work of singular, almost problematic, affability. The landscape, draped in bucolic elegance and archetypical Mozartian trilled cadences, can induce somnolence in a performance by an unwary ensemble.
Fortunately, conductor Francis
How to reach us highlighted the subtle details waiting here.
Late Mozart reveals Bach's influence, and the brief but vital episodes of imitative counterpoint in the first movement were rendered with clarity and momentum. Soloist Boris Allakhverdyan sculpted phrases with a mix of polish and muscularity. His ability to shape dynamics was especially compelling. The sublime Adagio was taken at an ideal tempo, barely riding the edge of repose, allowing Allakhverdyan to glide on instrumental updrafts in the orchestra.
Virtually no other instrument in Mozart's music, including his own piano, seems to be chosen so specifically for its timbral qualities. Allakhverdyan's masterful control of his instrument's sound let him highlight precisely that edgeless, luminous timbre that Mozart so admired. The Rondo finale is conversational in a way the other movements are not. For the first time, outbursts of minor and diminished chords appear to darken the sky, and these caprices of mood were thoughtfully emphasized by tutti and soloist. Extended, vaulting passages of non-legato writing for the clarinet were dazzling in Allakhverdyan's performance, as he soared over and through the ensemble with alacrity and power.
Beethoven's Fourth Symphony remains something of an enigma. The symphonies are less easily corralled into Beethoven's stylistic periods than either the string quartets or piano sonatas, and while the Fourth Symphony dates from 1806, the same year as the “Razumovsky” Quartets, the Violin Concerto and the “Appassionata” sonata, it is perhaps the least-known of the symphonies, overshadowed by the preceding one and the following two.
At first hearing, the menacing darkness of the opening seems to have little to do with the ensuing Allegro. Gradually, though, the music reveals affective echoes of the introduction, but these clarifying connections need to be nudged to the forefront, and Francis and allstars were able to set the dramatic details of the first movement into relief. This symphony follows “Fidelio” by only a few years, and, with the right treatment, a clear incidentalmusic quality is revealed. The counterpoint of character of the second movement, which places a dottedrhythm martial march beneath a lyrical song may have symbolic significance, representing the spirit of the patron, Count Franz von
Oppersdorff, who battled debilitating physical ailments, and the threat of war that hung gloomily over Europe during the Napoleonic Wars.
These competing poetic elements were vivid in Francis' reading, and individual groups of the orchestra emerged with identity and strength. The scherzo is an essay in syncopation and section work; strings and winds parry through fleeting arpeggios and transitions in and out of the lilting trio test an orchestra's ability with unison ritardandi.
Francis and group were effortless and energetic, both here and even more so in the rushing and vigorous final Allegro (whose “ma non troppo,” or “not too much,” was taken with a welcome grain of salt). Mainly Mozart's All-Star Orchestra is literally that — a group of ringers drawn from the finest orchestras, a fact which might present its own challenges, as players need time to acclimate themselves to a new group. But one wouldn't know these players aren't regular bandmates, as the sound is blended, supple and dynamic.
The festival's venue, the Surf Sports Park, is a delight in sound, sight and access. Listeners can choose between VIP tables or lawn seating, which both offer terrific sound, and it's hard to beat a coastal view at sunset. Food is plentiful and easy, and parking is as manageable as you'll find at any summer event in town.
The San Diego Union-Tribune, P.O. Box 120191, San Diego, CA 92112-0191