a glorious tribute

July 21, 2006 performance reviewed by Dave Conlin Read.

To celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birthday, the Boston Symphony Orchestra offerred a weekend-long immersion in the composer's nonpariel ouerve that easily showed why his popularity continues to grow, as well as why Music Director James Levine and the B.S.O. are beautifully suited to one another.

Maestro Levine ascended the podium in the Koussevitzky Music Shed Friday and Saturday nights and Sunday afternoon to lead his orchestra, several soloists, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus in six of Mozart's 600+ compositions, including his final symphony (the Jupiter, K.551), his last Piano concerto, Don Giovanni, generally regarded the "greatest opera ever written," and his last (and unfinished) work, the Requiem.

The Friday night program began with the concert aria for voice and piano "Ch'io mi scordi di te...Non temer, amato bene," K.505, sung by mezzo-soprano Susan Grahamm with Levine conducting and playing piano. This was an appetizing introduction to the weekend banquet. The image occurred to us of the orchestra as some great fine urn from which flowed the golden mead of Ms.Grahamm's voice.

Next came the Piano Concerto No. 27in B-flat, K. 595, composed in January 1791, eleven months before Mozart's death. Richard Goode's performance was so compelling that one forgot momentarily that he was sharing the stage with an orchestra. There were several passages, when, with all the notes played by one hand, the other would flutter over the keyboard like a butterfly. Mr. Goode's appearance contrasts dramatically with his performance; the one being that of a courtly, professorial denizen of an earlier age, the other being that of timeless sprite, going off in all directions only to return always to the same jaunty theme.

What a fine finale was the Jupiter, Symphony No. 41 (of 41!), composed during a seven week period in the summer of 1788 when he also completed numbers 39 and 40. In reference to this symphony, Robert Schumann wrote, "...about many things in this world there is simply nothing to be said; for example, about Mozart's C-major symphony with the fugue, much of Shakespeare, and some of Beethoven."

What can be said about this concert is that it was a glorious tribute to a genius of a bygone millenium given by a group of his most worthy successors.

Don Giovanni

Great art makes one think. For three and a half hours, Don Giovanni, widely regarded to be the greatest opera ever written, was on display in the Koussevitzky Music Shed, a quantity that made this reporter think that indeed, there can be too much of a good thing.

My experience of it was clearly diminished because I came to it with only a general idea of the plot, never having read the libretto nor listened to a recording, which I now think to be indespensible preparation for anyone wishing all the benefits available.

That would've freed me from the need to keep reading the supertitles, a chore that calls to the fore a part of the mind better left at rest while listening to music. The imagination is inhibited by the need to pay attention, and a mighty imagination was required to see the soloists in the full color in which their characters were created, while they performed, each of them brilliantly, in formal attire on a bare riser behind the orchestra.

Something else that breaks the spell is ill-timed applause, and there were at least a dozen eruptions of it during this performance. The leading classical music label Naxos has a friendly piece on concert etiquette on its website.

Mozart was a commercial artist, knowing that his audience would expect several hours of entertainment for the price of admittance to one of his concerts. Working today, my guess is that he would've known that his audience would be perfectly delighted with a two hour Don Giovanni.

Posthorn and Requiem

The Sunday afternoon program that closed Tanglewood's celebration of the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth was made up of Serenade No. 9 in D, K.320, Posthorn and the Requiem in D minor, K.626.

The Posthorn, commissioned by the university at Salzburg to mark the end of an academic term, got its name from the valveless, high-pitched horn that heralded the comings and goings of mail carriers, which is featured in one of the Seranade's two trios.

The Posthorn was the kind of piece whose scope, instrumentation, and execution allowed you to surrender to the music. Reverie induced in the early movements would be halted when the trumpets and drums reappear, assuring one's full attention for the work's finale.

Joining the orchestra for the Requiem were the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, John Oliver conducting, and four soloists, including Susan Grahamm, returning from her performance on Friday.

Mozart worked on the Requiem, which was commissioned by an ignoble nobleman who probably planned to pass it off as his own composition in commemoration of his wife's death, up until two days before his own death, but left it unfinished. His widow Constanze, fearing that she'd have to return the commission fee, scrambled unsuccessfully to get it completed by other composers. Mozart's pupil Sussmayr, who had been involved in its composition from the start, was responsible for a substantial part of the finished product.

There's some irony involved here, and maybe a lesson or two, in the crazy circumstance of just how this beautiful work came to be. Fraud was forefront in the minds of the people responsible for getting the work begun and getting it finished; although we know it as Mozart's Requieum, Suussmayr and Joseph Eybler, at least, could be credited as co-composers.

Perhaps the lesson is that sometimes, some very few times, the profanity of human deeds are rendered irrelevant by an overriding presence.

And there was nothing profane about today's performance; it was heavenly, an hour wherein the audience could revel in all that music makes available. Can there be anything more thrilling and transcendant than the Benedictus, sung first by the soloists in turn and then echoed by the 80 voice chorus to the orchestra's sublime accompaniment and the plaintive highlights in the trumpets and trombones?

Congratulations and thanks to Maestro Levine and Tanglewood for an unforgettable weekend that gave us the opportunity to witness both the breadth and depth of Mozart's great art and the brilliance of the musicians assembled for it's performance.

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