Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra – Louis Langree, conductor; Martin Helmchen, piano. July 30, 2019.

David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center.  Orchestra (Seat U5, $52.50).

Pre-Concert Recital

Fantasia in D minor, K. 397 (1782) by Mozart.

Traumerei, Op. 15, No. 7 (1838) by Robert Schumann.

Nocturne in F major, Op. 6, No. 2 (1836) by Clara Schumann.

Intermezzo in A minor, Op. 118, No. 1; Romanze in F major, No. 5 (1893) by Brahms.

Ko-Eun Yi, piano.

Program

Overture to Don Giovanni (1787) by Mozart.

Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K.466 (1785) by Mozart.

Symphony No. 3 in F major (1883) by Brahms.

This was our third Mostly Mozart concert, and our first encounter with Mozart.  It won’t surprise me if they change the name of this festival in the near future.

Let us first dispense with the pre-concert.  A different pianist and a different program were on tap.  Mozart’s Fantasia was nice, but I was hoping for something a bit more substantial in our first encounter with the composer for which the festival is named.

The other surprise was between Robert and Clara Schumann, the wife’s composition was the more virtuoso one.  During the last several years we have encountered more of Clara Schumann’s music (perhaps a herd mentality at work here?), and tonight’s piece was more substantial than ever.

The program concluded with two movements from Brahms’s Op. 118.  It probably takes someone who appreciates piano playing a lot more than I to tell what kind of a pianist Yi is; she did handle the more difficult pieces with ease.  Compared to other pre-concert recitals, this wasn’t a particularly memorable experience.

Ko-Eun Yi is a Korean pianist trained in the United States.

The first surprise in the main concert was that the usual concertmaster was sitting in the assistant’s seat, and Laura Frautschi, the former (?) second violin principal, led the orchestra for the evening.  We noticed last week the concertmaster (still listed as such in the program) had lost a lot of weight; not sure whether that had anything to do with the new arrangement.  To add to my confusion, last week the second violin section was all-women, tonight there were several men in it.

The second surprise was that Langree spent a few minutes to talk about the program, particularly how the three pieces belonged together.  He mentioned Mozart was the first “freelance” composer in that he didn’t work for any royal court, and that Brahms’s symphony starts with a statement “free but happy.”  Mozart wrote the piano concerto and Don Giovanni at about the same time (although for Mozart two years was a long time), and there are “quotes” of one in the other (my take).  What I didn’t know was that Brahms had a lot to do with popularizing Mozart, and that he encouraged Clara Schumann to add Mozart to her repertoire.  Also, Brahms’s third symphony was “infused with the spirit of Mozart” in its compactness, structure, and intimacy (also quoting from the Program Notes).

We saw Don Giovanni during our European trip in May, so the overture sounded quite familiar.  What I didn’t hear was the dramatic ending of the opera when Don Giovanni was dragged off to hell: it was supposed to be there at the very beginning.

This was our second encounter with Helmchen, who performed another Mozart concerto two years ago.  Tonight’s piece wasn’t Mozart’s most popular, so it brought with it a certain degree of freshness.  One could indeed argue it contains some of the dark ideas Mozart used in Don Giovanni.  Overall I enjoyed it: Helmchen’s playing had a lot to do with it.  The cadenzas were written by Clara Schumann.  She was born 200 years ago.

Helmchen and Langree after the Mozart concerto.

In both the overture and the concerto, the orchestra didn’t sound as crisp as I thought Mozart should be.

A rather large ensemble was used for the Brahms symphony: 10 first violins and 5 French horns.  Here the orchestra did a good job, and the different sections sounded great when they had the solo parts.  Musicologists can debate whether Mozart or Beethoven had more influence on Brahms – and I suppose one can make either/both cases – this was simply nice music to listen to.  Some make a great deal out of the beginning three notes (F-A flat-F) as Brahms’s statement of “free but happy,” they are not the most memorable of the different tunes heard in the symphony.

For Mostly Mozart this is a very large orchestra.

We again drove into the city and had street food.  We stopped by the new Turnpike rest area near Exit 11 on our way home, but ended up not eating there as the line was long.