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Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra
Louis Langrée, Conductor
Garrick Ohlsson, Piano
Russell Thomas, Tenor
“Mozart in London”
At Avery Fisher Hall
www.LincolnCenter.org
Frank Daykin
August 12, 2005
The French musician Louis Langrée has been music director of the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York since December 2002. He is also music director of the Orchestre Philarmonique de Liège, a position he has held since September 2001. During the 2005-06 season, in addition to concerts in Belgium, he will conduct the orchestra on tour in Europe, including at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, Musikverein in Vienna, and Victoria Hall in Geneva. Other engagements this season include return visits to the London Philharmonic and City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and his debut appearances with the Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi and Vienna and Scottish Chamber Orchestras. In Vienna in 2006 he will conduct the Camerata Salzburg in Mozart’s Zaide, directed by Peter Sellars, and a project with the Mark Morris Dance Company, both as part of the city’s Mozart anniversary celebration. (Program Notes).
Since his triumph as winner of the 1970 Chopin International Piano Competition, pianist Garrick Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of interpretive and technical prowess. Although he has long been regarded as one of the world’s leading exponents of the music of Chopin, Mr. Ohlsson commands an enormous repertoire, which ranges over the entire literature. His concerto repertoire alone is unusually wide and eclectic—ranging from Haydn and Mozart to works of the 21st century—and to date he has at his command some 80 concertos. (Program Notes).
A native of Miami, Russell Thomas joined the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, at the beginning of the 2003-04 season. Mr. Thomas performed Orff’s Carmina Burana with the Yakima Symphony Orchestra of Washington, as Ernesto in Don Pasquale with Spokane Opera, and appeared in recital in New York, Miami, and Manchester, VT. This season he made his Met debut as the Herald in Don Carlo and Tito in Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito. This marks his Mostly Mozart debut. (Program Notes).
Program:
Johann Christian Bach (1735-1782): Symphony in G Minor, Op. 6, No. 6 (1770) I. Allegro, II. Andante più tosto Adagio, III. Allegro molto.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major, Op. 15(1795, rev. 1800) I. Allegro con brio, II. Largo, III. Rondo: Allegro scherzando.
Garrick Ohlsson, Piano
W.A. Mozart (1756-1791):Va, dal furor portata, KV 21 (1765)
Russell Thomas, Tenor
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809):Symphony No. 104 in D Major “London”(1795) I. Adagio-Allegro, II. Andante, III. Menuetto e Trio: Allegro, IV. Finale: Spiritoso.
Wanted: an antidote to “freedom fries” and other distressingly pervasive anti-French bias in the United States. Found: in the person of the suavely musical French conductor of one of New York’s most beloved summer music institutions, the Mostly Mozart Festival. Maestro Langrée brings energy and shape to the “High Classical” period repertoire in a fresh, non-pedantic way, while demonstrating, as more and more conductors may eventually may want to (or have to!), his absorption of the recent trends toward lighter textures, vividly shaped “rhetorical” phrasing, and the excitement that rubs off on players and audience only when they know their leader is fully committed to the music. Nothing is left on automatic pilot. Even seemingly innocuous inner accompanying parts, syncopations, and the like, have all been dwelled on lovingly, with a driving concept behind them.
Friday’s concert began with one of the “G-Minor-mania” symphonies of the Sturm und Drang movement (Storm and Stress, a term borrowed from literature) that swept, tsunami-like, through German music in the 1760s and 1770s. This symphony was by J.S. Bach’s youngest son, who had a very cosmopolitan career, as compared to his father, with whom he studied for his first 15 years. J.C. Bach served at the Berlin court of Frederick the Great with his brother C.P.E. Bach. He then traveled to Italy for further musical instruction and influence. He finally settled in London, where he was very successful, becoming known as the “London” Bach.
The 8-year-old Mozart, while on his first extended prodigy tour, which included London, was said to have sat on Bach’s knees in front of the keyboard upon which both of them improvised together. Mozart revered the “London” Bach’s music, quoting many a melody in his own works, whether as a stimulus to his own composition, or at Bach’s death, as a touching memorial (Piano Concerto, KV 414). He even fell to the “G Minor” thrall, writing not one but two symphonies in the key, which had become associated with great turbulence and passionate expression for everyone who utilized it.
The performance bristled with the requisite intensity, the bustling inner figures were prickly while remaining supportive. J.C. Bach’s phrases are a bit squarer than the mature Mozart’s, but the melodic inspiration is still inventive. He had a particular “ear” for orchestral sound and texture, and sensitivity to anxiety of the 18th century variety as translated musically. Langrée’s typically French nervosité served the style well. The innovative “vanishing” last measures of the finale were so perfectly captured that the audience had trouble registering that the end had actually happened. Revealing that degree of surprise is a measure of his superior skill.
Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 (actually composed after “No. 2”) followed, with Garrick Ohlsson as soloist. He played the rapid movements with great brilliance, scope, and broad brush strokes that did not preclude poetry, particularly in transitions and momentary harmonic wanderings. Unfortunately, the Steinway he chose for the performance was raucous, rendering any dynamic above a mezzo-forte too harsh. Then again, most contemporary accounts of the heaven-storming young Beethoven mention how rough his playing was, almost uncouth, and definitely a shock to the Viennese. Ohlsson played the longest of the three cadenzas Beethoven wrote for the first movement. Its length is almost greater than the exposition and development together, and the coy return to the orchestral finish (no stereotypical trill) was rendered with great humor.
All of Ohlsson’s softer playing was breathtaking: meltingly beautiful, in both fast and slow movements. The Largo movement showed how much this pianist has gained from spending so many blissful hours on Chopin Nocturnes, for instance. The orchestral contribution should be mentioned too, for its fine detailing and intrinsic beauty. Too often in concertos, these parts are treated as “throw-away” filler. The finale had one of the fastest tempi I have ever heard in this work, but it was perfectly controlled and full of high spirits. Both conductor and soloist seemed to favor the “mercurial” (as opposed to the “granite block”) approach to their Beethoven.
After intermission, the young tenor Russell Thomas sang a “rage” aria (one of the stereotypical affects from Baroque and Classical opera) by an even younger Mozart, who was age nine when he composed it in London. He sang with a bright forward placed sound and clear diction; only his triplet coloratura runs (in the few places where the uncanny child Mozart placed them as a gauntlet to the unwary) were labored, therefore unclear. Thomas was appropriately greeted for his efforts with a hearty ovation.
To close, the “imported” Londoner, Haydn, was represented by his final symphony. Though he lived another 14 years, his attention turned to other musical forms. We have the aggressive impresario Salomon to thank for the existence of the last 12 Haydn symphonies. They were the result of Salomon’s composer-finding mission to Vienna in 1790. It was thought that Mozart himself would go to London to do much the same thing: write symphonies and give subscription concerts, but he died before Haydn’s return from his first London tour.
Langrée led the orchestra in an energetic, imaginative performance. His treatment of the opening Adagio’s fermatas (“holds” on one note) conjured up a visionary sense of limitless space. He also has a wonderful way with silence too, from which all music emerges, and to which it eventually returns. He holds pauses with great stillness and energy. The interruption of discourse, particularly in Haydn, is an essential expressive element—sometimes for humorous, sometimes for more “existential” effect. By the time the Croatian folk song that forms the melodic basis of the last movement had been reached, the sense of enjoyment among the audience members familiar with this work was palpable.
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