Philadelphia Orchestra's Vienna week

Mozart's 25th Piano Concerto, K. 503, has been a favorite of mine since I first heard it on an old LP with Maria Tipo, but for some reason it has always taken a back seat among his late concertos. It hasn't quite the drama of K. 466 or 491 or the melting lyricism of K. 467 or 488, but for half an hour in Elysium it yields to none of its sisters— a perfectly proportioned masterwork for a large late Classical orchestra that combines freshness and superb invention within a sureness and inevitability of design.

The four-note motif that generates the opening Allegro maestoso is as sovereign a gesture as the motto of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, yet it never calls particular attention to itself, being enfolded almost at once into the stream of melody. The central Andante builds its sublime architecture with a similar economy of means. There's a slightly martial cast to the music, but no single element drives it, and the interplay between piano and orchestra is so limpid that it seems one is hearing a single instrument, even though each strand of texture is ravishingly clear and distinct.

You can't really give a definition of the Classical without making it sound reductive, but the demonstration of it is here. And yet K. 503 also has a kind of incipient ripeness in its ample proportions that suggests a final maturity. If Mozart had lived even only for another decade, how might the nature of Romanticism have been transformed? But the gods evidently believed they had spared him long enough.

Soloist Emanuel Ax— if one can truly speak of a "soloist" here— played with the seemingly effortless clarity, fluency, and jouissance that comes only from a lifetime of dedication, and the Orchestra under Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos was richly detailed but never overbearing.

Consolation prize

Ax offered a bit of Schumann for an encore, lovely enough in its own right. But, after Mozart, silence is best.

When the gods took Mozart, they offered us Beethoven— no mean consolation prize. Beethoven reached so far into the future that we're still catching up. But the void at his death was palpable, and for a long time the giant molds he left went unfilled: Romanticism took, of necessity, other directions, and created new forms. There were a few large-scale symphonies, but none that wrestled with Beethoven's legacy.

Not until Brahms could anyone be tipped who had both the evident talent and the feel for Classical form required to recast that legacy for another age.

Brahms felt the weight of the challenge— who wouldn't?— and he took more than 20 years to complete his First Symphony. Its premiere at Karlsruhe on November 6, 1876, nearly 50 years after Beethoven's death, was an event awaited in certain circles no less than that of Wagner's Ring cycle that same year.

The celebrated quarrel between partisans of Brahms and Wagner, now largely forgotten except by musicologists, can best be seen as a contest for Beethoven's legacy. Wagner was writing what he called Zukunftsmusik, a "music of the future" that would embrace the other arts and create wholly novel forms of expression, and the Tristan chord is often cited as the basis for the sonic world of late Romanticism.

Brahms stakes his claim

There is no disputing Wagner's importance and influence— his music is slightly more a matter of taste, as Nietzsche pointed out— but I would submit that with the shuddering chromatic paragraph that opens the First Symphony, Brahms staked his own claim on the future, as well as his right to don the great mantle of the past.

Backed only by a steady drumbeat, it unfolds a world of psychological complexity and woe that is unmistakably modern, the world Wagner had begun to explore in Tristan und Isolde and that Freud, Mahler and Musil would take up later. Yet Brahms sought to contain this new world within the form of the Classical symphony, and just as Wagner made Bruckner possible, so it may be said that Brahms in some measure enabled Mahler, different as those composers were to be.

Brahms indicates this amazing passage— less an introduction than the matrix out of which the symphony as a whole develops— with a typically self-deprecatory shrug ("un poco sustenuto"); and the fiercely muscular Allegro that succeeds it— restless, agitated and densely worked— is unlike anything that had preceded it in the symphonic literature. Yet even as it strains at received forms, the Brahms First retains Classical proportion: the new is to be contained within the structure of the old.

A bit of shaking

A more conventional-sounding introduction heralds the finale, as the principal theme slowly worries itself to the surface. But the deep sense of trouble in the music persists throughout, even in the apparent exultation of its closing moments.

A new European personality emerges from this score, conflicted in ways we can only call modern: a response to the social and political revolution of the 19th Century and (like the earlier Brahms Requiem) to the post-biblical Darwinian world as well.

From a thousand Saturday afternoons, the Brahms First has become a familiar drone to many concert audiences, and Maestro Frühbeck apparently thought a bit of shaking would help. It didn't.

The opening sustenuto— fiendishly difficult for any conductor and ensemble— wasn't sustained as it must be, breaking down before the end, and orchestral balances went awry. The audience was clearly pleased, but, although things went better toward the end, this listener was unpleasantly jarred.

The concert opened with Mozart's Serenata notturna, K. 239, played concertante-style with reduced strings, drum and a quartet of soloists surrounding the podium. The players were all fine, and Don Liuzzi provided the delicious percussion touch, but the hall again swallowed the sound as it had done a few concerts back with the Bach Fifth Brandenburg.

Maybe mediocre acoustics don't matter much with a mediocre orchestra, but this orchestra— whatever the future may bring— still deserves better.