Orchestra plays Mozart and Bruckner (1st review)

The Philadelphia Orchestra led off last week's concerts with Mozart's Piano Concerto in F (K. 459), the last of the half dozen he tossed off in 1784. Visiting conductor Jaap van Zweden led the work in his debut with the Orchestra, with Horacio Gutierrez as soloist.

K. 459 isn't as familiar as some of Mozart's other mature concertos, but all the better for appreciating the seemingly effortless perfection its 25 minutes represent: heaven-sent melodies, marvelously interwoven lines between soloist and orchestra, playful interludes that nonetheless add up to a thoroughly integrated whole, and not a dull or wasted note.

After Shakespeare, there were still plays to be written; after Raphael, still paintings to be made. But after Mozart? You could make other kinds of music or sound other sonic and emotional registers. But you couldn't raise his art form to greater perfection. As it's said that all philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, so all music is to Mozart.

Of course, each Mozart concerto is a new world, no less than, say, each Bruckner symphony. K. 459 contains a splendid, march-like introduction, at the end of which the piano glides in ravishingly; an Allegretto middle movement whose principal theme rises like a sigh; a turbulent episode that looks forward to the Sturm und Drang of K. 466; and a rondo with delicious fugal and contrapuntal writing.

The Orchestra danced on its toes with the music, though there's an inevitable Romantic overlay with modern instrumentation and performance style. Gutierrez was limpid, elegant, and precise.

Worldly vs. devout

Well, where do you go after Mozart? In this case, to the Bruckner Ninth Symphony. No two more differing personalities could be imagined, musically or otherwise, than the worldly and effervescent Mozart and the devout Bruckner. Bruckner's ultimate model was Beethoven, who approached Mozartean delicacy much like a bull in a china shop, and consequently forged his own expressive language.

Beethoven widened— and ruptured— classic sound space, and redefined dissonance. After Berlioz and Liszt, Wagner carried out a further revolution, relegating (as he thought) sonata form to the dustbin of musical history.

Wagner should have made the symphony impossible, but his two foremost late-19th-century acolytes, Bruckner and Mahler, devoted themselves to little else. Mahler famously remarked to Sibelius that a symphony should contain the whole world (Sibelius disagreed).

A question of charm (or its lack)

Bruckner's symphonies, on the other hand, seem to have been written from the inside out, and they massively block out anything but themselves. Each is a Forbidden City whose immense architecture we can admire but never quite possess. It is the opposite of Mozart, whose transparent textures are made entirely to share.

The operative word, I suppose, is charm. Mozart is superlatively charming, in the very best and happiest sense of the word. Bruckner lacks even an ounce of the stuff. As a mere mortal, he cared very much whether his music was liked, and he was crushed by bad reviews. But Bruckner's music itself gives the sense of being sublimely indifferent to its reception. Take it or leave it, it seems to say; this is what's on my mind.

Bruckner knew his Ninth Symphony would likely be his last, and with no time to spare for less weighty concerns, he declared that it was dedicated to the praise of God. Perhaps God felt praised enough by the first three movements, because Bruckner didn't live to complete a fourth and final one.

Some performances have tacked on an independent work, the Te Deum, in lieu of a finale, but that has never worked. The fact is that, like Schubert's unfinished Symphony, the Bruckner Ninth feels entirely complete, with its pounding Scherzo serving, as often in Mahler, as a fulcrum on which massive outer movements are balanced.

Pandemonium of Hell

What, one wonders, would Mozart have made of Bruckner's score, had he been miraculously transported to a performance of it? Perhaps Mozart would have heard the pandemonium of Hell. Of course, the conceit of time travel is a parlor game, for our own ears adjust to the evolving language of music, and don't skip whole centuries.

Nonetheless, the dissonances of the Ninth are still challenging, especially the chord cluster at the climax of the Adagio that sounds all the pitches of the diatonic scale at once. Only a harmonic space as large as Bruckner's could contain such an event within even the most liberal boundaries of tonality without shattering the music altogether.

Maestro van Zweden was less than fully successful with the opening movement (Feierlich, misterioso), where his sometimes brisk tempos didn't let the music quite breathe. The trio of the Scherzo was particularly snappish, although the reading here was more plausible.

The great Adagio was given full voice, though, and although the brass had a stumble or two earlier, I thought I could get through the performance, and this review, without criticizing the horns. The last entry, though, in the very last bars, produced another embarrassing blooper.

Even great orchestras make mistakes. They shouldn't tolerate them, though.♦


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