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| David Robertson |
David Robertson will conduct both programs, which will feature the same soloist as last weekend, the redoubtable Emanuel Ax. That means that piano concertos will again be prominently featured.. Expect four of them this time: No. 14 in E-flat major, K. 449 on Friday; No. 16 in D major, K. 45 and No. 17 in G major, K. 453 on Saturday and Sunday; and No. 20 in D minor, K. 466 on Friday.
The first three, like the last week's Concerto No. 19, date from 1784, an immensely productive year in Mozart's life when he was celebrated and a rising young composer and pianist in Vienna, while No. 20 was written the following year. He knocked out the 14th through 17th concertos in two months, in fact-between February 9th and April 10th. Even for a composer who famously dashed off music as though (to cite an image from Peter Shaffer's Amadeus) he were taking dictation from God, that's pretty impressive. "Composing," as John Suchet notes in a new Mozart biography, "was Mozart's way of breathing."
And they're really, really good concertos to boot. "While no man can accurately be referred to as the inventor of a musical form," write Brockway and Weinstock in Men of Music, "Mozart did such a perfect job of fusing and adapting certain elements he found at hand that the classical concerto for piano and orchestra may be regarded as his achievement." He created works that were simultaneously entertaining and insightful, despite the fact the only two years earlier he had dismissed the entire genre a letter to his father as requiring music that was "either so simple a coachman could sing it, or so unintelligible that audiences like it simply because no sane person could understand it."
For me, the giant among these four concertos is No. 20. It's gripping, menacing, and filled with the kind of high drama that audiences would come to love so much in the ensuing decades of the 19th century. Beethoven loved this concerto, performing it often and composing two cadenzas for it, Mozart's own having been lost to history. It is, in fact, sufficiently "modern" for its time that Viennese audiences might have been put off by it, had it not been the work of a man who was at the peak of popularity. "The composer-pianist was at the time still the idol of Viennese society," writes former Los Angeles Times music critic Herbert Glass, "his audiences willing to accept anything that flew from his pen, even so uncharacteristic a score as the Concerto in D minor-if Mozart were also the performer."
The final work on the Friday's program-Mozart's Symphony No. 39 in E-flat major, K. 543-is the first of a set of three that the composer dashed off in the summer of 1788. Nobody is really certain of the source of what Arthur V. Berger (in a New York City Symphony program note) called the "sudden efflorescence of inspiration" that produced Mozart's last and, in the estimation of many writers, greatest symphonies, but the results speak (or rather sing) for themselves.
K. 543 gets less attention than the other two, much as a normal human being would be less noticed standing next to a pair of NFL linebackers, but that doesn't make it any less a great composition. "This symphony," writes musicologist Andrew Firmer, "is...a prime example of the composer's genius that he is not only able to conjure up melodies, but weave them with apparent contradictions that seem to connect with impossible ease." Those contradictions include Mozart's assimilation of the contrapuntal techniques he got from the music of Bach and Handel. "It was this synthesis of 'learned' style with the clean clarity of classicism," writes Brian Robins at allmusic.com, "that caused so much trouble for Mozart's contemporaries, to whom his late style became increasingly 'difficult.'" Today, with over two centuries of hindsight, it's clear that this "difficult" music is both ingeniously complex and wonderfully clear.
Concluding the Saturday concert is the second member of that titanic trio, the Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550. Like the Concerto No. 20, it's urgent and forward-looking, which may be one reason why it's one of the composer's most popular works. It has also produced a wide variety of responses from critics and Mozart biographers. Some, like Charles Rosen in his legendary tome The Classical Style, have emphasized its obvious dark and brooding moods while, others have noted what Robert Schumann called its “Grecian lightness and grace.” Personally, I tend to come down on the “dark and brooding” side. Like Mr. Rosen, I see it as "a work of passion, violence, and grief."
Interestingly, the noted early music authority Nikolas Harnoncourt is of the opinion that Mozart ultimately intended his last three symphonies to be heard as a single, twelve-movement work. He recorded them that way in 2014, in a two-disc set that The Guardian's Andrew Clements describes as "thrillingly well played." Hearing all three over the course of two weekends (the orchestra did No. 41 last weekend) might not be quite the same as encountering them back to back, but it's something to consider when you go to Powell Hall this weekend.
Each of the upcoming programs opens with an opera overture. Friday it's the lively opener for the 1790 comedy Così fan tutte (an idiomatic phrase that roughly translates as "they're all like that") about a pair of soldiers who decide to test their fiancées' fidelity, with embarrassing results all the way around. Saturday and Sunday it's the more weighty overture to Don Giovanni from three years earlier. Mozart supposedly dashed it off at the last minute, but you'd hardly know that from the neat way it shifts the mood from portentous drama to skipping comedy in its seven-minute length.
The Essentials: David Robertson conducts The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, with pianist Emanuel Ax, in an all-Mozart program Friday at 10:30 a.m., Saturday at 8:00 p.m., and Sunday at 3:00 p.m., September 29 - October 1. The Friday concert features the Piano Concertos Nos. 14 and 20 and the Symphony No. 39. Saturday and Sunday the program will feature the Concertos Nos. 16 and 17 and the Symphony No. 40. The Performance takes place at Powell Hall in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.
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