One week, three concerts

For me, art is primarily something you experience. But it’s a form of experience that engages every facet of your personality. Last week, I attended three concerts that offered a glimpse of the range of emotional, aesthetic and intellectual experiences that music offers to those of us who attend concerts as frequently as other people attend plays and movies.

Sunday afternoon I heard Tempesta di Mare play Baroque music on period instruments. Thursday, I took in a Philadelphia Orchestra concert devoted to Beethoven and Shostakovich. Friday I attended the annual Vox Ama Deus all-Mozart concert.

Both the big pieces at the Vox Ama Deus and Philadelphia Orchestra concerts were clearly “about” something. The Shostakovich 11th Symphony was officially composed to commemorate the abortive Russian uprising of 1905, but Shostakovich’s audience would have heard it as a response to the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Communist dictatorship, which took place while he was writing it. For me, it’s a potent response to all oppression— left, right or just plain nasty.

Another kind of faith

Mozart’s Grand Mass is a more conventional exercise: a musical treatment of a standard religious text. Under the baton of Vox’s music director, Valentin Radu, it became a powerful expression of religious faith— one of the strongest I’ve heard in a concert hall.

I’m not a believer, but I am a product of Western civilization. For me, the Mozart was a deeply moving affirmation of words that have sustained millions of my fellow Westerners through all the trials and sorrows of the last 2,000 years.

The Baroque instrumental music played by Tempesta di Mare, in contrast, makes no attempt to enlist its audience in a great world-shaking cause. It creates a world of its own— a world of color, warmth and high-hearted exuberance that offers just as much comfort, in its way, as religious belief.

Beethoven’s poetic side

We modern folk like to describe earlier periods as “simpler” than our own, but there’s no such thing as a simple time. Every time has its own tensions, not to mention universal perennials like death, disease and the clash of personal ambitions and desires. Bach and his contemporaries created orderly, aesthetically moving musical worlds despite the world around them, not because of it.

All three concerts, coincidentally, featured keyboard concertos. At the Philadelphia Orchestra concert, an international star, Yefim Bronfman, took on the length and passion of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto.

Bronfman is a virtuoso capable of producing long, rippling passages that punctuated the concerto with dazzling displays of technical mastery. But he’s also an artist who can follow a display with the beautifully shaped, tender melodies that capture Beethoven’s poetic side.

Wiping his forehead

At the Tempesta di Mare concert, Adam Pearl presented an equally impressive technical display on a less assertive solo instrument. The harpsichord can’t produce the thunder of the piano, but it’s a faster instrument, and Bach’s four-voiced counterpoint presents challenges that are just as great as the hurdles Beethoven devised. Pearl jokingly wiped his forehead when he took his bows after the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, and everyone in the audience appreciated the gesture.

No new music was included on these programs, but all three were influenced by a very contemporary concern: musical scholarship.

At the Vox Amadeus concert, Valentin Radu conducted Mozart’s 24th Piano Concerto from the keyboard— an 18th-Century practice that’s becoming increasingly common as performers attempt to recreate the historical practices that may have influenced composers.

More important, Radu played without using the pedals. He kept the contrasts between loud and soft within the narrow range that was imposed by the type of piano Mozart would have used.

Scholarly approach

Tempesta di Mare constructed a musically satisfying concert around a scholarly structure. The program surrounded Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto with examples of the styles that influenced Bach’s work.

Concertos by Scarlatti, Vivaldi and Couperin provided examples of the Roman, Viennese and French styles that Bach studied. Pachelbel’s Canon and Gigue offered a glimpse of Bach’s German ancestors, and a Telemann concerto finished the program with a piece by his greatest German contemporary.

The Tempesta concert would have been a success if the pieces had been selected solely because they sound good, but the musicological theme enhanced its interest. When Tempesta’s musicians launched into the opening of the Brandenburg, for example, you could hear the zest and drive of Vivaldi’s allegros embellished with an emphasis on harmony that added body and depth.

Orpheus myth

Our knowledge of the historical setting of Shostakovich’s symphony obviously reinforced its impact. But Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto has some interesting associations, too. Musicologists have linked it to an Orpheus ballet that Beethoven started and never finished.

I’ve heard performances that emphasized the concerto’s association with the Orpheus myth. Bronfman generally ignored the idea. But omission is a type of statement that can be just as informative as the things an artist says.

Mozart’s Mass in C Minor raises a perennial question. Mozart left major portions of it unfinished. So what do you do when you perform it?

Purists would argue that you should play only the parts that Mozart finished. Others have completed the mass by adding sections from Mozart’s other works.

Neglected for centuries

Valentin Radu chose a version completed, from Mozart’s sketches, by his student Franz Sussmayr, who did the same thing with Mozart’s Requiem. Sussmayr’s version went unplayed until its first performance in 1901, in Dresden. It became a standard feature of the Salzburg Festival after World I.

At some point, intellectual debate must yield to the music itself. The Sussmayr completion, in my opinion, is one of the greatest settings of the Mozart mass I’ve heard— a grand, brilliant piece that should be played as often as the best complete works Mozart left us.

It may not be the mass Mozart would have written, but so what? The critical test isn’t the name of the composer. If a work of art creates the kind of experience this performance created, the byline on the first page is irrelevant.♦


To read another review of the Philadelphia Orchestra concert by Robert Zaller, click here.