United Kingdom Mozart and Schoenberg: Mahler Chamber Orchestra / Dame Mitsuko Uchida (piano and director). Royal Festival Hall, London, 1.2.2023. (CSa)
Mozart – Piano Concerto No.25 in C main, Ok.503; Piano Concerto No.27 in B-flat main, Ok.595
Schoenberg – Chamber Symphony No.1 in E main, Op.9 for 15 Solo devices
In his memoirs, The World of Yesterday, the Austrian author Stefan Zweig described the interval of his childhood and youth earlier than the First World War as ‘The Golden Age of Security’. It appeared to him to be constructed to final. ‘Anything radical or violent seemed impossible in such an age of reason but today … the word “security” has been struck out of our vocabulary as a phantom.’ He went on to specific settlement together with his pal and up to date Freud ‘who saw our culture and civilization as a thin veneer through which the destructive forces of the underworld could break at any moment. We have had to accustom ourselves slowly to living without firm ground beneath our feet.’
The identical seismic forces have been in proof in a contrasting programme of Mozart and Schoenberg, supplied by the 37-strong Mahler Chamber Orchestra and its Director and Artistic Partner, Dame Mitsuko Uchida. Two Mozart piano concertos, No.25 in C, Ok.503 which started the live performance, and No.27 in B-flat, Ok. 595, which ended it, noticed Uchida enjoying and conducting from the keyboard. These late works by Mozart represented the logic, concord and reassuring order related to the First Viennese School, whereas the night’s centrepiece, Schoenberg’s iconoclastic and turbulent Chamber Symphony No.1 in E, represented the Second.
Uchida is broadly thought-about to be one of many main Mozartian pianists of the day, and there may be little to say about her supreme artistry that has not already been stated. She performed the 2 concerti with limpid readability, excellent phrasing, and full management. In an empathetic partnership with the MCO, she additionally demonstrated an unstinting generosity of spirit in direction of her fellow musicians. Sitting together with her again to the auditorium, at a lidless piano which had been turned to face the choir stalls, she was carefully encircled by the opposite gamers. Little formal course was required, and Uchida stood solely often to beat time or usher in a particular part or solo instrumentalists. Although the piano acoustic was considerably muffled, the results of her collaborative strategy was music-making of fast impression and nice intimacy, notably in a corridor which held a capability viewers.
Piano Concerto No.25, Ok.503, opens with an Allegro of operatic grandeur, punctured by passages of intricate woodwind polyphony. The small-scale forces of the MCO – 29 musicians in all – and the employment of arduous timpani mallets and valveless, pure trumpets, introduced genuine eighteenth-century scale and color to the efficiency. Uchida’s finely judged entry – without delay softly understated and determinedly robust – marked the start of a splendidly fluid dialog between orchestra and soloist. After a pensive and intriguing cadenza got here a sluggish motion of singular magnificence, and a leisurely finale by which piano and woodwind positively sang collectively in a rhapsodic duet. It is invidious to single out anyone particular person in such high quality collegial ensemble enjoying, however it will be remiss to not point out the heat of Júlia Gállego’s flute and the plangency of Andrey Godik’s oboe all through these outstanding exchanges.
Once the chairs on the platform had been stacked and the Steinway Grand wheeled offstage, 15 members of the Mahler band assembled, led by the dynamic violinist, José Maria Blumenschein. Apart from a lone double bassist and a single cellist who sat, the remaining group stood on the entrance of the platform to play Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No.1 for Solo devices.
Schoenberg composed this unsettling work as a single motion piece in 1906, roughly 120 years after Mozart had accomplished Ok.503 and 12 years earlier than the outbreak of a warfare which might shatter the Hapsburg Empire and upend world order. ‘It is the climax of my first period’ declared the composer. It has subsequently been described by one US musicologist as ‘an act of ruthless, purifying compression in reaction to the late-Romantic giganticism’, a reference to the size of the compositions, but in addition to the huge orchestras used to play them. The symphony might be seen as one motion divided into 5 distinct components, with dissonant passages which stretch tonality to its outer limits. Snatches of conventional melodies suggestive of Brahms, Richard Strauss and Mahler flit momentarily by way of the music’s always shifting soundworld, like ghosts in an exorcism. The symphony shouldn’t be regarded merely as a problem to the standard musical order. It additionally foreshadowed the political and social upheaval quickly to be unleashed in Europe. Formidably troublesome to play, Schoenberg’s composition requires a excessive degree of virtuosity. The MCO’s soloists met its calls for with excellent technical talent, agility and, with out a conductor to information them, an unusual degree of cohesion. Subtle enjoying by the wind part was seamlessly interwoven with strings and horns and made for a wonderfully balanced, fluent and thrilling efficiency.
Any post-Schoenberg anxieties have been calmed after the interval by an excellent rendition of Piano Concerto No.27, Ok.595, Mozart’s final. Altogether darker and harmonically extra complicated than Ok.503, Uchida, with out speeding, captured the melancholic temper of the opening Allegro, making each observe sing in opposition to a background of pulsating strings. The second motion, a gently ornamented Larghetto of aching magnificence, was performed with beautiful grace, whereas the trippingly joyful finale lifted the center. The viewers’s roaring approval was rewarded with a small piano encore – the second of Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces, Op.19 – a tiny morsel of compensation for many who hoped that this live performance would by no means finish.
Chris Sallon