Orchestra plays Mozart and Bruckner (2nd review)

The Philadelphia Orchestra may have created a peculiar juxtaposition when it scheduled Mozart's 19th Piano Concerto with Bruckner's Ninth Symphony. But the program had one notable virtue. Conductor Jaap van Zweden proved he could handle both ends of the orchestral spectrum.

Mozart's symphonies and concertos were written for small orchestras playing in small halls, and that's the way many of us are accustomed to hearing them nowadays. A big orchestra like the Philadelphia must compete with our memories of the natural liveliness of small orchestras like the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, playing in halls like the Perelman Theater.

The first movement of Mozart's 19th contains some of his catchiest themes, and van Zweden and soloist Horacio Gutierrez managed to capture that graceful vivacity without sounding small or restrained. The performance had obviously been scaled up, to fit the environment of a bigger hall, but it didn't feel that way.

In the third movement, on the other hand, van Zweden used the extra weight at his disposal and added some useful oomph to Mozart's final romp.

Monumental cathedral

The Bruckner is, of course, like all Bruckner symphonies, the kind of huge, monumental cathedral for which big orchestras were created. But Bruckner combines mass and length with an unpredictable musical imagination. You know you're going to hear something big when you listen to the Ninth, but no one could have predicted episodes like the peculiar pound of the scherzo movement.

Bruckner didn't finish the Ninth because he died before he could come up with a fourth movement that satisfied the demands of his insecure, over-critical artistic temperament. Personally, I'm inclined to think he couldn't create a satisfactory fourth movement because the symphony didn't need one. It's a finished work of art as it stands.

The long slow movement that now ends Bruckner's Ninth communicates the same autumnal, elegiac attitude that many of us respond to in Brahms, on a bigger scale, with ultra-long horn passages that include the extra poetry of the Wagner tubas. The ending is a moment of final serenity that creates a perfect farewell to life. A traditional large scale, upbeat final movement would have sounded bombastic.

Van Zweden's low profile

Van Zweden is another conductor who arrives in the city without much fanfare and leads the orchestra without drawing attention to himself. When he lowers his arms after the final note, you don't feel like you've heard a great performance. You feel you've heard a great, moving piece of music.

But that doesn't just happen. Somebody must keep all those instruments working together. Somebody must make hundreds of decisions regarding artistic matters like instrumental balance and the exact pace of the tempos. In this case, somebody did.♦


To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.