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First Metropolitan United Church
April 12, 2013
Even genius has to serve an apprenticeship; despite what some would claim, not every single work by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is an unqualified masterpiece. Indeed, most authorities agree that his first such was the Piano Concerto, K.271, what we might describe as his "watershed" work.
Friday night's concert from the Victoria Chamber Orchestra gave us two examples of pre-watershed Mozart and one supreme, indisputable masterpiece.
The evening opened with the Symphony No.15, K.124, which dates from 1772 when its composer was just sixteen years old.
It is, to be sure, the work of a remarkably precocious and talented youth: but one must ask whether it would ever be heard had it come from another pen,
Yariv Aloni and his orchestra were reinforced for the evening by the presence of a wind section - oboes and horns in this work - and, with no disrespect to their more usual, string-orchestra incarnation, it cannot be denied that the addition of just a handful of players expands the textural possibilities enormously.
Combine that with a wonderfully weighty bottom end (courtesy of six cellos and two basses) and I could have spent much of the evening simply enjoying the sheer sound of the music.
But there is, of course, more to music than just sound. In the case of K.124, we heard a marvellously energetic opening movement, a smoothly flowing andante, and a robust - if hardly danceable - minuet. (In reality, one can hear this as an early example in the line of distinctly Austrian minuet/scherzo movements - perhaps it is the influence of the ländler - from Mozart to Schubert to Bruckner.) And a true presto finale.
The Violin Concerto No.5, K.219, known as the "Turkish" because of the middle section of the finale, is a fine example of the maxim that it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Mozart's internal editor was not yet quite up to the task that his prolificity imposed on it.
Ceilidh Briscoe was the winner of this year's Louis Sherman Concerto Competition and one cannot help but wonder how such a relatively small population base - even if it does extend up-island, with one of the competition finalists hailing from Nanaimo - can continue to produce this continuous stream of prodigiously talented youngsters.
Briscoe - as have her predecessors - brings something of her own to the party; in her case, from her confident singing entry in the opening movement, to the gentle bounce of the finale with an especially trenchant digging in to the "Turkish" music, it was a combination of the elegant and the spirited. The way the music should go - but alas, does not always.
Fine a performance as this was - the orchestra's securely confident introduction almost serving as an announcement that this music was an old friend (by my calculation they probably play it every couple of years), Briscoe's tempos (yes, the soloist does get to set the main tempos) exceptionally well chosen and supported by a totally attentive Aloni and his responsive musicians - fine as it undoubtedly was, it could not disguise the fact that the concerto is essentially too long: that internal editor should have trimmed each movement a little.
To go from these two early(ish) works to the G minor Symphony, K.550, is to understand the distance that even a great genius can (has to?) travel.
That this, the longest work of the evening, should seem by some margin the shortest is a testimony to three things: the sheer quality of the music, Aloni's taut direction and the totally committed playing of the orchestra, now featuring nine wind players: one flute, pairs each of oboes, bassoons, clarinets and horns. Again one could, if one wished, simply revel in the sound itself, which was glorious.
Throughout the work Aloni showed fine attention to detail, particularly dynamics, and one must also mention the excellently clean lines in the fugato section of the finale. Only in the minuet was the tempo anything other than obviously "correct"; in this case it was perhaps slightly steadier than is usual, but all the more forceful for that (and the trio was delicious).
This may have been the single finest performance I have ever heard from the orchestra and it was the perfect close to a wonderful evening's music making.
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