Symphony Review: Mostly Mozart fortnight finishes on a high note

Last Friday and Saturday (November 15^th and 16^th) it was all Mozart (almost) all the time, as Music Director Stéphane Denève led the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in two symphonies, an opera overture, and a piano concerto by Mozart, along with contemporary composer Anna Clyne’s “Within Her Arms” from 2008. I attended the Friday night concert and loved every minute.

It all began with Mozart’s Symphony No. 1 in E-flat major, K. 16, penned when Mozart was eight years old and known primarily as a piano prodigy. It’s a modest little bagatelle with a strangely mysterious second movement. The six-measure phrase in the bass line suggests someone cautiously tiptoeing in the shadows and wouldn’t leave my mind for days afterward.

Stéphane Denève
Photo: Dilip Vishwanat, courtesy of the SLSO

It's trivial stuff, but it was played with the same loving attention that Denève and company gave the weightier pieces on the program. And it is, after all, pretty impressive even for a prodigy and even if he did (probably) have some help from his dad.

Next Behzod Abduraimov joined the band for the Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466. It’s full of drama for two movements and then bursts into a cheerfully vigorous finale. Friday night Abduraimov delivered the same combination of technical assurance and wide emotional range that so impressed me in his Grieg concerto back in 2018. He used the Beethoven cadenzas for the first and last movements (Beethoven loved the concerto and played it often) and played them with authority.

Denève was so completely in synch with Abduraimov all the way that they might as well have been two minds with a single thought—or at least with a unified vision of the music. Denève was especially attentive to Mozart’s drama; the abrupt change from piano (p) to forte (f) at measure 15 of the first movement struck like a thunderbolt. It was quite a remarkable performance all the way around, with a wider emotional compass than I have heard in some recordings.

Abduraimov got the expected standing ovation. What was less expected was his encore choice: the third of Liszt’s six Paganini Etudes, S. 141, nicknamed “La Campanella” (“The Handbell”) because of the way the demanding right-hand part imitates the sound of a small bell. The selection of such a challenging piece was gutsy after a work as demanding as the Mozart concerto, but the glittering quality of the performance left no doubt about the wisdom of that decision.

After intermission it was back to Mozart’s youth with the overture to his  opera seria “Mitridate, re di Ponto” (“Mithridates, King of Pontus”), which he composed at the ripe old age of 14. It’s essentially a short suite of three tunes from the opera, the second of which had some notable playing by flautists Hannah Hammel and Associate Principal Jennifer Nitchman. It’s lightweight stuff that contrasted strongly with the more emotionally intense “Within Her Arms.”

In pre-concert remarks, Denève explained his choice of the Clyne work by noting that while Mozart was in Paris writing the final piece on the program— the Symphony No. 31 in D Major, K.297 (“Paris”)—his mother was dying. The symphony was premiered on June 18^th, 1778, and on July 3^rd Anna Maria Mozart breathed her last. You don’t hear any of Mozart’s grief in the symphony, so Denève chose to acknowledge that absence with Clyne’s work, written as an elegy for the death of her mother in 2008.

Scored for fifteen strings (six violins and three each of violas, cellos, and basses) “Within Her Arms” is somewhat mysterious music. The main theme has the feel of a British folk tune, but the body of the work summons up a haunting sense of aural space that reminded me of Vaughn Williams’s “Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.” It rises from a whisper to a roar before finally fading away, slowly, into nothingness.

For this performance, Denève had the musicians gathered into a semicircle with the violins and violas in front, standing. That made it easier to hear the way in which Clyne plays with the physical space on the stage, bouncing fragments of the melody among the players to create that sense of a kind of sonic cathedral. It’s a complex, layered work that demands (and got) superb playing by an ensemble of (mostly) principal and associate principal members of the SLSO strings.

The “Paris” symphony brought the evening to a happy conclusion. Mozart knew that Parisian audiences liked big, noisy works with (in the words of George M. Cohan) “plenty of biff and bang” and, since he was hoping for steady work in the City of Light, he happily gave it to them. Written for the largest orchestra he had ever used (including, for the first time, clarinets) and with liberal use of devices like the coup d’archet (unison string playing) beloved of the French, K. 297 aimed to please. And it did.

This is music of dignity, grace, and spirit. It got a crackling, energetic reading from Denève and the orchestra. The Allegro assai first movement was appropriately noble. The Andante second movement was elegant and even a bit cheeky at times (the little grace notes in the violins felt like the musical equivalent of a wink). And the Allegro finale, with its scurrying eighth notes in the second violins, dashed along at a brisk and bracing pace.

This pair of concerts were Maestro Denève’s last appearances this year with the orchestra, but if you missed them take heart: through December 17^th you can listen to a live recording of the Saturday night performance at the SLSO website. Even if you managed to catch this one live, it is worth listening to again. Abduraimov played a different encore on Saturday (Rachmaninoff’s Prelude No. 5 in G major), but otherwise the program is the same.

Regular season concerts continue this weekend (November 22 and 24) at the Touhill as Jonathan Heyward conducts the SLSO and piano soloist Yeol Eum Son in William Grant Still’s “Threnody: In Memory of Jean Sibelius,” Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5. A recording of the Friday morning concert will air on Saturday, November 23, at 7:30 pm on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.