San Francisco Classical Voice

SYMPHONY REVIEW The Piano Concerto and Mozart's Creativity

June 28, 2001

By Thomas Schultz

Few composers can withstand the test of being programmed on concerts of only their works. It's difficult for me to imagine, for example, an all-Debussy concert, an all-Haydn concert, or an evening of nothing but Boulez. But it works for Mozart, and did again Thursday on the fourth of the San Francisco Symphony's five Mozart Festival programs.

Conducted in a crisp, laconic manner by Neville Marriner, the orchestra gave a fleet performance of the Overture to The Marriage of Figaro. This well-known work is a marvel of musical excitement and animation, qualities that appear immediately with the first sounds of the music and then evaporate before the listener can securely grasp them. It must have been a piece like this that John Cage was referring to when he spoke of his enthusiasm for Mozart's works where the music "suddenly bursts into flames."

Mozart must surely be regarded as a master of orchestral color. (I can even imagine a series of programs tracing an interesting musical lineage of orchestral timbre: Mozart . . . Schubert . . . Webern . . . Feldman.) He is often overlooked in this regard in favor of composers like Debussy, Berlioz, and Stravinsky, with their overt use of unexpected and unusual instrumental timbres. The success of a work like the Symphony No. 41 ("Jupiter") depends on a performance that brings out the variety of instrumental colors within the orchestra in an imaginative way. Each moment is clarified and enlivened by tonal colors that are at times thick, thin, dark, bright, strident, or muted.

Timbres Too Bland, Tempi Too Even

In this performance, however, Marriner and the orchestra smoothed over the striking character of individual instruments, producing instead a generic, almost monochromatic timbral quality. I wished, at times, to hear the music delineated by a brighter vibratoless string tone or by more colorful wind and brass playing.

There is a danger, in performances like this, that Mozart's more unusual instrumental combinations will seem simply like compositional errors. This was true in some remarkable passages, such as near the end of the second movement, where the melody is not just doubled but "tripled," played simultaneously by the first violins, the flutes, and the bassoons.

Marriner's approach to tempo in the "Jupiter" seemed excessively metronomic. Passages where the tempo can vary subtly or where a pulse may be lacking completely (the silences of the measure-long rests in the first movement) are crucial to breaking up what can seem like the unrelieved regularity of the music.

Wondrous Piano Concerto

Before intermission Marriner and the orchestra, along with pianist Lars Vogt, gave a superb performance of the C Minor Concerto, K. 491. Such performances make it possible to believe that the piano concerto is the highest manifestation of Mozart's creativity. Here, the composer's boundless ingenuity in exploring standard forms is paired with writing that moves effortlessly and without hesitation through keys and themes. In this concerto, the woodwinds play a vital role, engaging the pianist in musical dialogue repeatedly throughout the three movements. (Busoni's remark about Mozart leaving no musical question unanswered springs to mind.)

Vogt made it possible to forget the ugly tone of the Steinway he played by spinning out the music, sometimes in a simple, direct manner, at other times with a more complicated expressivity. Particularly in the cadenza of the first movement, his control of dynamics and tone color created the illusion of a second orchestra. At times, Vogt's passagework was simply amazing — clear, atmospheric, and humorous at the same time. In this work, the playing of the woodwinds was very fine, and Marriner's conducting animated and sensitive.

Throughout the concert, a large portion of the audience consistently applauded between movements. Is this the influence of the local classical radio station's practice of playing individual movements of a piece in isolation from the rest of the work?

(Thomas Schultz is a pianist and a member of the faculty at Stanford University.)