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FESTIVAL REVIEW
July 23, 2005
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By Jerry Kuderna
The second concert of this year's midsummer Mozart Festival conducted by George Cleve on Sunday at St. John's in Berkeley was an homage both to the composer and to a pianist — the late pianist Lillian Kallir, who had been an outstanding Mozartean in her own right. The works presented in her memory could not have been better chosen. Each represents a milestone in Mozart's huge and varied output, highlighting his gifts as a composer of instrumental and vocal music, both separately and in combination.
For all his precocity, it is possible to trace the real establishment of Mozart's “maturity” to a few key works which seem to say, “even though I come from a small town, there is nothing small about my talent.” Each of the pieces chosen for this concert reflects an aspect of Mozart's awareness of his unique gifts. The overture to Idomeneo, the opera that began the process of the composer's separation from his Salzburg family and the founding of his own in Vienna, opened the program and set the stage for the centerpiece of the program, the “Great” C minor Mass.
Composed at the age of 26 as both wedding gift to his wife and a peace offering to his father, the Mass is a work that is unique in its combination of passion and tenderness — an outpouring of love that seems to predict the glories of Così and Figaro. It is easy to understand why it upset the arbiters of “correct” church music of the time. It brings God closer to human beings than any work written for the church before it and shows the sense of his own worth, which Mozart had developed. By including many fugues which were strengst verboten by his old boss, the Archbishop Colloredo, but so loved by his new wife Constanza, Mozart opted for his personal freedom over the stable job. That the work only widened the rift between the composer and the Salzburg church establishment is shown by the fact that he never bothered to finish it after it received its first performance the day before he left his hometown.
Sunday's performance of the Mass captured so much of its daring and loving spirit that it hardly seemed to matter that he did not write the final ”Agnus Dei.” Mozart's music does not need divine intervention to grant us peace. Ending with the ”Benedictus” seemed like the proper place to end. The ”Et incarnatus est,” radiantly sung by soprano Christina Major, gave expression to the divine within the merely human. Given a big voice, capable of floating the high notes with great ease and sureness of pitch, she conveyed the great love Mozart bore his Constanza. Mezzo-soprano Deborah Berioli was the perfect counterpart to Major in the ”Domine” duet and her solo ”Laudamus te.” Lacking solos of their own tenor Joseph Muir and Bass-baritone Joseph Wright supported admirably in the trios and quartet. The concert-aria “Ch'io mi scordi di te?” also featured Major as well as Seymour Lipkin in the piano solo and showed the peerless opera composer Mozart was to become. It was effective despite some balance problems brought about by the crowded conditions on stage. The vocalist should have been placed in the foreground where she could be supported by the brilliant piano part rather than in competition with it. This was not the fault of Lipkin, who played with discreet virtuosity, nor of Maestro Cleve, who could not be faulted, but arose merely from the constraints of too small a stage. It could have been my lack of focus, too, since I kept looking for a translation of the text which was not to be found in our program notes. The Piano Concerto in B-flat K. 450 rounded out the concert with just the right amount of brilliance and lyricism. Seymour Lipkin played with a little more restraint than warranted by such an insouciant piece, but he hit his stride in the finale, a rollicking affair which sports not one but two cadenzas. Most at ease in the middle variation movement, he gave the simple chorale the most luxurious decoration imaginable. Along with ”Incarnatus est,” this was the most moving moment of the concert, invoking cherished memories, made radiant by Mozart's music.
(Jerry Kuderna is a pianist who teaches at Diablo Valley College)
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Seymour Lipkin
Christina Major
