The first program of this year's Midsummer Mozart Festival, under the direction of George Cleve, was presented last night in San Francisco at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. As had been the case with last year's opening program, the core of the evening consisted of two concertos, K. 467 for piano in C major (still labeled from time to time as the "Elvira Madigan" concerto, even if the movie of that name has been long forgotten) and K. 218 for violin in D major. The piano soloist was the prodigious fourteen-year-old Audrey Vardanega, the youngest soloist in the history of the Festival; and the violin concerto was performed by the orchestra's concertmaster, Robin Hansen. The two concertos, separated by a decade, were performed in reverse chronological order on either side of the intermission.
Beyond the quality of its writing for piano, K. 467, composed in 1785, boasts of one of the richest instrumental ensembles for a Mozart concerto: one flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, two timpani, and strings. As a result the experience involves not only the "primary dialog" between soloists and orchestra but also a host of "secondary dialogs" among the wide diversity of instrumental sonorities. It is writing like this during the eighteenth century that would eventually legitimize the "concerto for orchestra" concept in the twentieth. When the ensemble has so much to say and is saying it so eloquently, the soloist has more than the usual challenge of maintaining the foreground. Presumably, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart himself never had much of a problem with this challenge. Indeed, this very idea of "so many voices, so much to say" would emerge a year later on the opera stage in the finale of the second act of the K. 492 Le Nozze di Figaro, as more and more characters contribute to spinning a plot that becomes more and more complex.
Vardanega approached her part of this conversational complex with a light touch and a full measure of technical skill. She brought that same sense of a still center in the midst of churning activity that made her performance of "Un Sospiro," the third of Franz Liszt's S. 144 concert studies so compelling at last April's Young Pianists Play Liszt concert. What was lost in the stillness, however, was the brash assertiveness through which the piano commands attention in the midst of all that orchestral activity. However elegant and sophisticated the overall conception of this concerto may be, the piano is still dominated by the spirit of Mozart the show-off kid, who is still not ready to give up his "inner twenty-year-old." Vardanega was too polite to let this spirit strut its stuff; and, while the result was technically impressive, rhetorically it was a bit too much on the bland side.
K. 218, on the other hand, was composed in 1775, before Mozart had turned twenty but long after he had found his show-off groove. Indeed, we know from his correspondence with his father Leopold (excerpts of which were included in the program book) that he could show off on the violin with the same enthusiasm he brought to the piano; and Hansen had no trouble embracing that enthusiasm. If K. 467 explored sonority through a wide assortment of orchestral instruments, K. 218 took exactly the opposite strategy, unfolding an entire rhetoric around the changes in sound quality across the four strings of the violin. The ensemble string work in the introductory section prepares us for the nature of this rhetoric but not for the diversity revealed by the solo work. The show-off kid is playing out one star turn after another, and Hansen was with him through all three movements of his exhibitionism.
One particularly curious arrangement ensued on the ensemble side, however. As the program book observed, Vardanega is a "triple threat" music student, pursuing studies in piano, violin, and composition. When Hansen gave up the concertmaster chair to perform as soloist, that chair was filled by her stand partner, Christina Mok. The second chair was then taken by Vardanega (who had shared a second violin stand in the final Midsummer Mozart preview concert at Old St. Mary's Cathedral on June 29). She brought the same focus to her ensemble work that provided the foundation for her technical skill as a piano soloist. This made the coupling of these two concertos almost a "family affair," with performers sharing responsibilities for solo and accompaniment work.
The two symphonies that opened and closed the concert respectively were separated by eighteen years and were performed chronologically. The evening began with K. 124 in G major, the product of the sixteen-year-old Mozart in Salzburg; and it concluded with the G minor K. 550. Both symphonies were given brisk readings deftly shaped by Cleve's attention to the rhetorical subtleties of the composer's phrases. Indeed, K. 550 may have gone a bit beyond brisk through Cleve's recognizing that the opening tempo is "Molto allegro" and making it a point not to ignore the "Molto." The two symphonies are separated by not only time but also scale. K. 124 is relatively brief, serving almost as an overture to the concertos that would follow. K. 550, on the other hand, is an extended exposition of the expressive capacities of the symphonic forms. Each of its movements can provide opportunities for extended study (and all of them have done so in the academic literature). Taken as a whole the symphony is a stimulating journey, and under Cleve's direction that journey progressed at just the right pace. The result was an entire evening that covered a broad range of Mozart's life and creative abilities, which amounts to the essence of our annual Midsummer Mozart celebration.
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