San Francisco Classical Voice

Any day in which I can enjoy good, back-to-back live performances of Mozart's D Major "Haffner" Symphony, K. 385, and his D Minor Requiem, K. 626, is a great day to be alive. The pleasure of hearing these two masterpieces pleasantly played Sunday afternoon by the semiprofessional Master Sinfonia Chamber Orchestra at Los Altos' United Methodist Church helped overcome the stifling heat of the day.

David Ramadanoff, the orchestra's music director, is a serious, well-trained musician and a very competent conductor who has been good for years, with thoughtful performances intelligently selected and carefully prepared. It is obvious that he takes pleasure in participating in the performance of good music by excellent musicians for an appreciative audience. The Bay Area should be grateful that he has been conducting here since the mid 1970s, when he was a conducting associate under Seiji Ozawa with the San Francisco Symphony.

The "Haffner" symphony is a great treasure, written when Mozart was only 26. The original manuscript, a document with a fabulous history, rests permanently in the United States. Philanthropist Mary Flagler Cary bought it in 1940 as a gift for New York's National Orchestral Association. In 1979, to raise funds for its activities, the association sold the holograph to New York's Pierpont Morgan Library, where it resides today. Just one of the many previous owners of this treasure was the mad king Ludwig II of Bavaria, who was given the score on his 20th birthday.

Sunday's performance was well paced, with comfortable tempi chosen for every movement. Oboist Rebecca Van De Ven was delightful in her few but well-executed solo passages. The elimination of the slow movement's second repeat (a bad decision) was compensated for to some degree by the inclusion of the minuet's repeats, even those not normally executed following the da capo. It's a practice that we almost never hear in today's rush-rush world of music performance.

While the Haffner Symphony has an interesting history, the Requiem's is unparalleled. Begun as a secret commission to commemorate the February 1791 death of the young and beautiful Anna von Walsegg, wife of an Austrian nobleman and amateur musician, it was never completed by Mozart. At his death it was only an unperformable torso. Prepared for performance by Franz Xaver Sussmayr under conditions still unclear despite over 200 years of scholarly research, what we hear is surely a shadow of what Mozart might have completed had he lived.

If the chorus sings well, it is difficult for a performance of the Requiem to be less than satisfactory. Such was the case with the 90-member Schola Cantorum, Gregory Wait, music director. Normally some 130 members strong, the group was reduced in size partly because of space limitations. The chorus' work in the Kyrie fugue and Dies Irae was especially commendable. The four soloists, Marnie Breckenridge, soprano, Layna Chianakis, mezzo, Michael Kull, tenor, and Douglas Lawrence, bass, were wonderfully effective, particularly in the Tuba Mirum, in which the tenor trombonist, Garo Gagliano, played his nightmare of a solo almost flawlessly and with a sweet tone.

Unfortunately, the acoustics of the Los Altos church muffled the articulation of the text, a surprising situation since much of the building is wood. Perhaps that the heat of the day required all doors to be opened contributed to the problem. The heat also caused intonation problems in the upper strings, particularly noticeable in unison passages.

It is always unfortunate when something has to be substituted for the still-rare basset horn pair called for by Mozart in this stupendous composition. Here, Ramadanoff had to be satisfied with clarinets, though intelligently and effectively executed by Terry Cross and Barbara Cohn. But the tone character of clarinets simply cannot a match the plaintive quality of basset horns (which are to music what basset hounds are to dogdom).

In his selection of a performing edition (a problem caused by complexities found in few other works of music), Ramadanoff used Franz Beyer's recent reworking of the problematic orchestration completed by Sussmayr in 1792. I'm grateful he did so. Beyer's edition eliminates the infelicities of the traditional performance materials without changing the fundamental character of this incomplete but treasured masterpiece.

Since there were no program notes, Ramadanoff followed his usual practice of relating the major facts about the works to be performed. It is a pleasure to hear such an accurate and literate analysis of both the music's history and the sociology of the times. Further, it serves the practical purpose of giving the audience confidence that the person about to lead a performance of a work knows something about its often-peculiar background.

(Musicologist/author Dan Leeson is a former member of the San Jose Symphony Orchestra, a retired businessman, and an editor of the 220-volume complete Mozart edition published by Bärenreiter.)

©2000 Dan Leeson, all rights reserved