Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra – Louis Langree, conductor; Nelson Freire, piano. August 20, 2011.

Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, Orchestra Right (Seat D6, $50).

Program
Symphony in C (1938-40) by Stravinsky (1882-1971).
Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58 (1804-06) by Beethoven (1770-1827)

Anne had to go to a volunteer meeting in Flushing earlier today, so she drove the car in. I met up with her and her co-worker Vivian in Flushing. They ran about an hour late, though, so we couldn’t make it to the 7 pm free concert. We had dinner at Ollie’s.

Our seats were not the best, being the fourth row from the stage, and a bit to the right, thus directly below the second violin section. I experimented with the M|M website for next week’s program, and one could only get “best available” seats which are B2 and 4, even worse. The upside of this was we could hear the piano very clearly.

The Program Annotator (David Wright) for these M|M concerts certainly speaks more to my level, although one could argue a bit if his observations were a bit contrived, especially when it came to Beethoven’s concerto. I will touch on this later in this blog.

Per Wright, Stravinsky looked at composing music as a job more than as an expression of his emotion. The Symphony in C was written during a period when his daughter, his wife, and his mother passed away within six months or so, the first two from tuberculosis (Stravinsky himself was diagnosed with the disease that year). Yet the composer said an attempt to look for personal emotion would be in vain. The composition of music, however, did help him recover.

Compared to what we heard a few days ago (Symphonies of Wind Instruments) this is clearly a more traditional symphony. It even contains the usual four movements: Moderato alla breve, Larghetto concertante, Allegretto, and Largo – Tempo giusto, alla breve. There evidently is quite a bit of debate on whether Stravinsky meant for this to be a “real” symphony, or just a more complex version of ballet music. My vote is with the latter. The piece certainly isn’t easy to perform, at least for this orchestra, but the relatively limited range of emotions and the repetitions of several basic motifs support the argument that this is not a symphony in the manner of other masters such as Mozart or Bruckner. Knowing the situation Stravinsky found himself in at the time, one could attribute some emotion to the end, despite the composer’s statement that it is not so.

Our seats allowed us to hear the second violins clearly. For some reason one of them came across particularly clearly during this piece. Good thing she played very well. She wasn’t particularly loud, nor did she move around more than the others (unlike our “heart-attack” violist in the Philharmonic), so an individual’s ears may be tuned to particular timbres.

Since Nelson Friere won a piano competition with Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto in 1957, and began his international career in 1959, one would think he must be in his 70s. Turns out he was born in 1944 and thus a mere 66 years old: another of these Every Ready Bunny child prodigies.

Beethoven also wrote this concerto during a turbulent period in his life (of course most periods in Beethoven’s life were turbulent). Among other things, he was going deaf. Annotator Wright describes some of the passages as a dialogue of Beethoven’s better self with his inner demons (especially the second movement), I am quite sure this is an after-the-fact interpretation and Beethoven didn’t say “Ah, let me fight with myself.” In any case, much of Beethoven’s music shows this sort of stark contrast and juxtaposition. Nonetheless, thinking of the music this way makes it much more interesting. Awareness of this fact sheds new light as one listens to the outbursts of the orchestra and the quiet passages of the piano in the second movement. The Program Notes also indicates the C major start of the third movement is the wrong key for a concerto in G major. I never understand statements of this sort. Perhaps I would appreciate the difficulty if I knew my composition techniques more, but in this case Beethoven managed to move along seamlessly with a couple of short phrases in the strings.

All this technical analysis doesn’t detract from the fact that this was an enjoyable performance. Again, our seats allowed us to hear the piano clearly; while it was never overwhelming, you do wish the orchestra could keep up, or the balance between the soloist and the orchestra could work out better. We heard this live last year (Ohlsson and Orpheus) and the year before (Ax and New York Philharmonic). I don’t think I would discuss this performance as effusively as I did Ax’s. But it was very good. For the record, the movements are Allegro moderato, Andante con moto – Rondo: Vivace.

It didn’t take much applause to prod Friere into encores. I am quite sure his first one was a Chopin Nocturne, with the repetitive left hand accompaniment and the mixing of beats in the two hands; the second one sounded American, Copland perhaps? We left after the second one, he did continue (I won’t know how many.)

With M|M concerts, I take the attitude of just go and enjoy. Tonight’s concert exceeded expectations. The New York Times Review identifies the encores by Freire, he played a couple of pieces by a Brazilian composer, of course.

We drove to Flushing to drop Vivian off, and still managed to get home by about 11:30 pm, even though traffic was a bit on the heavy side.