Mozart Symphony No.1 in E-fat major, K.16
Mozart Concert aria, ‘Va dal furor portat’, K.21
Gluck ‘In mezzo a un mar crudele’ from Telemaco
J.C. Bach ‘Cara, la dolce fiamma’ from Adriano in Siria
Philidor Scene from Act 3 of Tom Jones
Gluck ‘Di questa cetra in seno’ from Il Parnaso confuso
Sacchini ‘Barbara figlia ingrata’ from Creso
Mozart Concert aria ‘Conservati fedele’, K.23
Haydn Symphony No. 39 in G minor
J.C. Bach Trio, ‘Ah, genitore amato’ from Adriano in Siria
Anna Devin (soprano)
Sarah Fox (soprano)
John Mark Ainsley (tenor)
Classical Opera’s Thursday night concert 1765: A Retrospective, at the Wigmore Hall, marked the launch of their Mozart 250 project. The idea of this innovative twenty-seven year journey through the life and music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has excited me for months and Thursday’s concert, the first of a series of events to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Mozart family’s fifteen-month stay in London, marked a welcome point of no return for Classical Opera and conductor Ian Page. The Wigmore Hall concert essentially provided a snapshot of music from 1765; not just the young Mozart’s music, but that of renowned composers Johann Christian Bach, Christoph Willibald Gluck and Joseph Haydn, and lesser (if at all!) known composers François-André Philidor and Antonio Maria Sacchini.
What is most attractive about the Mozart 250 project is its presentation of Mozart’s music in its own historical context, effectively allowing us to encounter the composer ‘on his own terms’; indeed, Page expressed a similar sentiment in his pre-concert talk. I currently spend my time working specifically on the Mozart family’s visit to London, yet this is the first time I have been able to attend a concert featuring some of Mozart’s earliest works (though not through want of trying). Too often with Mozart, precedence is accorded to his late and ‘great’ works at the expense of all else. Yet how can his first symphony, K.16, performed at the concert, compare to his last, K.551, ‘The Jupiter’? The point is that it should not have to, and Mozart 250 allows us to consider each work with the historical perspective it deserves.
Page’s pre-concert talk was well delivered, despite the fact that he was actually standing in at short notice. Among other things, we were treated to excerpts from Daines Barrington’s report on the infant Mozart’s abilities, a useful overview of the featured composers, and insights into Page’s own thought process when first approaching a piece of music for rehearsal. Also evident was the overwhelming amount of work required when selecting the best and most representative cross-section of musical works for a given year. I was left wanting a slightly more in-depth discussion (either from the talk or the programme notes) of the rationale behind the evening’s specific programme choice; while the compositions by Mozart and J.C. Bach (a close colleague of the Mozarts while they were in London) were obvious choices, Page himself admits that Mozart was most likely unfamiliar with Philidor and Sacchini’s work. In addition, when touching upon the Mozart family, Page chose to stress some of the traditional biographical narratives of the period, such as Leopold taking full advantage of his children’s abilities, and comparisons to Mozart as a ‘circus animal’. Page was, nevertheless, keen to stress the ‘extraordinary educational advantage’ that Mozart gained as a result of the early European travels, which is a valuable and often overlooked interpretation of the family’s motivations.
The quality of music was, over the course of the whole evening, superb, and the opening piece – Mozart’s Symphony No. 1 in E-flat major, K.16 – was my personal highlight. In Page’s introductory words, we were ‘starting at the beginning’ with a symphony by an eight-year-old child. Although actually composed towards the end of 1764, the earliest presumed performance date for the work was 21st February 1765 at the Little Theatre, Haymarket. The programme noted Mozart’s assimilation of the musical styles he was exposed to, and the influence of Leopold’s acquaintances J.C. Bach and K.F. Abel prevalent in this symphony. While melodically simple, Classical Opera’s orchestra (under the direction of Page) made a lot of the piece’s dynamic and textural contrasts. This was especially noticeable in the Andante, with the gradual build-up of sound through each phrase creating a lovely effect, even if a pianissimo note was occasionally split by one of the horns. The playing throughout the evening of oboists Rachel Chaplin and Leo Duarte is to be highly commended, and their subtle ornamentation towards the end of the symphony’s Molto Allegro was most welcome.
Having mentioned above that further detail on Page’s programming decisions process may have been welcome, the range of concert arias aptly highlighted the technical training Mozart had already acquired at such a tender age. As Daines Barrington’s report highlighted:
‘Happening to know that the little Mozart was taken notice of by [Manzuoli], the famous singer… I said to the boy that I should be glad to hear an extemporary Love Song… The boy looked back with much archness, and immediately began five or six lines of jargon recitative proper to introduce a love song… I then desired him to compose a Song of Rage, such as might be proper for the opera stage. The boy again looked back with much archness, and began five or six lines of a jargon recitative to precede a Song of Anger.’
Indeed, we heard two of Mozart’s own early concert arias, a song of fury, ‘Va, dal furor portata’, K.21, and a farewell love-song ‘Conservati fedele’, K.23, performed by tenor John Mark Ainsley and soprano Anna Devin respectively. Rage and love arias by Gluck, ‘In mezzo a un mar crudele’ (Devin) and ‘Di questa cetra in seno’ (performed by soprano Sarah Fox), and Sacchini’s rage aria ‘Barbara figlia ingrata’ (Ainsley), also serve to indicate the range of compositional conventions that the young Mozart was absorbing. The skills described in Barrington’s report – which also comments on Mozart’s abilities in sight-reading, score reading, and modulation – were all standard and expected of any professional musician.The impressive thing here is that Mozart had reached this level of professional training so early on in his development.
The vocal performances from Ainsley, Devin and Fox were all exceptional. Ainsley’s and Devin’s double-act in a scene from Philidor’s Act 3 of Tom Jones amused the audiences and it was interesting to know that, although rarely heard now, the piece was performed throughout Europe and translated from French into German, Russian and Swedish during the composer’s lifetime. Devin was especially convincing as the sorceress in Gluck’s ‘In mezzo a un mar crudele’, her dazzling virtuosity capturing the drama and vengeance. Fox’s resonant, lyrical, tone in Bach’s love aria ‘Cara, la dolce fiamma’ from Adriano in Siria made for an apt contrast. Perhaps the most striking piece, though, was Gluck’s ‘Di questa cetra in seno’ (Fox), on account of the scoring for viola duet (beautifully performed by Simone Jandl and Mark Braithwaite) accompanied by plucked strings and a bassoon.
This concert left me musing over the fact that, actually, our enjoyment of music from the Classical period is rather narrow, not just in the canonical approach taken towards the ‘great masters’, but also in the preference given to works from the peak of a given composer’s career. One consequence of this is that composers such as Philidor and Sacchini, both highly successful professionally, have fallen into obscurity – Philidor is better known for his career as a chess player than for his music! Another consequence, touched on at the start of this review, is that composers’ early works are largely overlooked, for example, Haydn’s Symphony No. 39 in G minor, featured in the second half of the concert.
This concert served as an excellent introduction to the first phase of Mozart 250. Those who missed it should make every effort to attend the project’s forthcoming Lecture Series at the British Library, and the Mozart in London Festival Weekend at the Barbican’s Milton Court, which promise to be highly stimulating, both musically and intellectually.
1765: A Retrospective, the launch of Mozart 250, took place at London’s Wigmore Hall on 22nd January 2015.