Last night in Herbst Theatre the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (PBO), led by Music Director Richard Egarr, presented a program devoted entirely to music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The title of the program was Mozart the Radical, but there was just as much radicalism in Egarr’s approach to preparing the program. Three of the compositions were composed in the same year, 1786. In chronological order these were the K. 491 piano concerto in C minor, the K. 504 “Prague” symphony in D major, and the K. 505 “concert scene” for soprano voice and piano, which begins with the recitative “Ch’io mi scordi de te.” (When was the last time a program was prepared with successive entries from Ludwig Ritter von Köchel’s catalog?)
The remaining work was another concert scene, composed the following year while Mozart was preparing the premiere of his K. 527 Don Giovanni opera. The piece was the next entry in Köchel’s catalog, the K. 528 concert scene “Bella mia fiamma, addio.” The program thus almost constituted a “snapshot” of a very productive period in Mozart’s life.
The program was also adventurous in beginning with one of the only two piano concertos Mozart composed in a minor key. Indeed, a listener unfamiliar with the classical music repertoire could easily believe that K. 491 was composed by Ludwig van Beethoven, not just for the minor key but for the stormy rhetoric that dominates the first movement. The listener with a more accurate sense of history could easily believe that this was an initial “warm-up” in preparation for all those intense moments in Don Giovanni.
Egarr conducted K. 491 from the keyboard, working with what was probably the largest complement of winds and brass that Mozart summoned for a piano concerto. What is of particular interest are the ways in which each distinctive instrumental sonority makes its own unique contribution to a rich palette of sonorities. As a former clarinet player I was especially drawn to the many imaginative motifs assigned to the pair of those instruments. However, the real joy of this listening experience came from appreciating the relation between all those instrumental sonorities and the often ferocious passages for the solo piano work, undoubtedly played by Mozart with all the intensity he could muster.
Equally stimulating was Egarr’s account of the K. 504 symphony. This is one of Mozart’s three-movement symphonies, omitting the stately minuet that is supposed to intervene between the slow movement and the finale. The D major key made for just the right complement to the minor key rhetoric of the piano concerto, suggested that Egarr had selected them as a matched set of bookends for his program. Like K. 491, this music is rich in its diversity of instrumental sonorities, even if the wind resources were more modest (and both trumpets and timpani were omitted).
Soprano Elizabeth Watts, featured in the middle portion of Richard Egarr’s all-Mozart program (courtesy of PBO)
Those bookends framed the vocal performances of soprano Elizabeth Watts, making her PBO debut. An orchestral setting is not the most conducive to dramatic rhetoric; but Watts found just the right combination of phrasing and body language to draw the audience into the intensity of her texts. Both of these vocal works amount to dispositional reflections on a broader narrative context. However, Watts’ interpretations kept the attentive listener focused on the immediate present, rather than trying to establish that context for each of the texts.
These concert arias tend to receive relatively little attention in concert programming. This is particularly true of K. 505, in which a piano enhances the soprano’s rhetorical turns, leaving the instrumental ensemble to “fill in the background.” However, if the thematic content was unfamiliar, the dramatic qualities of Watts’ interpretations left the attentive listener curious about other works in this particular category of the Mozart catalog.
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