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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
August 19, 2006
"This boy will cause us all to be forgotten".
The words were written about the 15-year-old Mozart; the prediction itself is remarkably accurate: if not for this single quote, who today would know anything about Johann Adolf Hasse?
Saturday's closing concert of the 20056 Victoria Summer Music Festival was three-quarters Mozart - yet the three works were very different, albeit not as different as the fourth work on the programme.
Many critics believe that Mozart's very finest (public) music is contained in his operas and his piano concertos. Certainly the world has seen little to compare with the astonishing run of the latter, beginning in 1782 with K.414 and ending less than five years later with K.503 - fourteen of the greatest concertos ever written.
Saturday's concert closed with Mozart's own version of K.449 in E flat, for piano plus string quintet of two violins, viola, cello and doublebass.
Jane Coop, Mary Rannie and the Borealis Quartet gave a delightfully fresh and energetic performance of the concerto. Balances were on the whole very good - particularly in the finale - and the entire performance was informed with the performers' palpable sense of enjoyment.
And, really, there is little more to say.
The surprise of the evening - for anyone who had been expecting a quartet version of the Pines of Rome - was Ottorino Respighi's Quartetto Dorico. This is part of what John Waterhouse in The New Grove calls a "series of large and unexpectedly sober abstract works" which the composer produced in his later years (the quartet dates from 1924).
Quite what the significance of the title is, I could not say; "Doric" to me means just two things: one of the two major dialects of Ancient Greek - the other being Attic; or one of the three styles of Greek column - the others being Ionic and Corinthian, with Doric being the plainest.
From its octave/unison opening the Borealis gave the quartet a reading of, at times, almost unbearable intensity. The music is quite clearly divided into several distinct sections, of greatly differing character, yet still seems a little long for its material, despite some marvellously lyrical moments and some very exciting ones.
A fine performance which has certainly continued my own newly-acquired interest in the chamber music of Respighi.
Jane Coop opened the concert's second half with a poised and deeply felt Rondo, K.511 by Mozart. As she pointed out in her brief (and commendably audible) introduction, Mozart wrote few works in minor keys; each has a very definite and distinct character. In Coop's hands, K.511 was mournful and laden with grief, yet never hysterical or overblown.
The concert opened with an assault on Mozart's Quartet in F, K.590.
This, for me, was the major disappointment of the evening. For a few minutes it seemed as if the group had gone back in time to their early days, days of hard-driven and sometimes poorly-balanced playing.
Doubtless when new member, cellist Shih-Lin Chen, has settled in a little the balance problems will ease. On Saturday, however, his full rich tone failed to blend and consequently the textures were all first-violin-and-cello - reminding me of Neville Cardus's remark that "most string quartets have a basement and an attic, and the lift [elevator] is not working."
Perhaps matters would have been better had not violist Nikita Pogrebnoy been seated on the right. The viola is naturally the quietest of the instruments in the quartet and placing it so that the f-holes face directly away from the audience only exacerbates matters, especially when the far more powerful voice of the cello is aimed directly at the listener.
But the key concept which seemed to elude the quartet in the Mozart was relaxation. Playing Mozart (or Haydn) at this level of intensity does the music a disservice; to take a single example, perhaps the most egregious: the minuet started well enough but at the first forte suddenly were were in middle-period Beethoven territory.
Given that none of this exaggeration was on display when they performed a Haydn quartet here three years ago, my disappointment was all the keener.
Overall, though, it was a most satisfying and enjoyable evening. Certainly the packed audience seemed to think so.
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