Grosser Saal, Mozarteum, Salzburg, 23.1.2025 (MB)
Mozart: Suite in C major, KV 399: ‘Ouverture’Bach: Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582
Peteris Vasks: Viatore
Mozart: Masonic Funeral Music, KV 477, arr. Heribert Brauer
Arvo Pärt: Trivium
Bach: Partita no.2 in D minor for solo violin, BWV 1004: Chaconne, arr. Matthias Keller
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| Image: Wolfgang Liebacher |
Mozart famously named the ‘king of all instruments’ in a letter to his father of 1777, though somewhat oddly one encounters the phrase more often with ‘queen’ in German—as in the title given to this Mozart Week recital by Iveta Apkalna. We are all gender fluid now, I suppose, and it is not as if ‘monarch’ would work any better in German, given the distinction between der Monarch and die Monarchin. Perhaps it was a little surprising not to hear here the works Mozart wrote for mechanical organ, especially given the festival’s focus on Mozart’s last year, but Apkalna came up with an enterprising programme of her own. I cannot share enthusiasm for the ‘holy minimalism’ of Peteris Vasks and Arvo Pärt, though again I tried, but all works on offer received due advocacy on Hermann Eule’s 2010 ‘Propter-Homines-Orgel’.
The ’Ouverture’ to Mozart’s fragmentary C major Suite is generally encountered on the piano, whether modern or ‘period’, but Apkalna showed us there is no reason it should not be played on the organ. The simple act of listening to it like thus brought home correspondences with those late organ works that might otherwise be missed, but I suspect it was Apalkna’s performance too. The Suite’s other movements are more ingratiating and to my mind successful too, but this shows the devotee of Bach and Handel – Bach particularly in this movement – grappling with their keyboard legacy in well-nigh pastiche form. Certain suspensions and other harmonic touches gave a little more of the game away, though fewer than one might imagine.
Bach’s great C minor Passacaglia should
sweep all before it, and did so here in a performance of laudable inevitability,
detail and form conspiring to offer a deeply moving experience. Registration and
manual changes clarified structure, but also contributed to a sense of the
character of each variation, the final fugue emerging as crowning glory on this
crowned head of instruments. In an age in which, as Adorno lamented even in
1950, Bach is so often robbed of emotional and intellectual content, let alone
grandeur, it was very good to welcome back the composer who inspired Mozart and
so many others.
Vasks’s Viatore opens with a slow, repetitive melody that eventually changes over a long pedal note, which then cedes to a slow-moving line on another manual. Some material seemed strongly to echo the Passacaglia theme, a coincidence that was surely deliberate in programming. There was no gainsaying the commitment of the performance, but the work’s repetitions soon palled; the longer it went on, the less there was to show. Eventually, it stopped. I could not help but think I should have preferred an actual improvisation rather than vague mood music that suggested one. At least it was not aggressively tedious in the manner of Pärt’s Trivium. The composer’s devotees will doubtless tell us that is the point, or one is not listen properly, one is soulless, and so on. Whatever… Inconsequential triads repeated themselves over and over, occasional relief offered by registration changes and relative dissonance. I suppose ‘AI’ would do this sort of thing now, fifty years on.
A skilful arrangement by Heribert Brauer of Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music fell in between: an oasis of genuine intellectual and emotional involvement, by a composer who saw only identity between Christian faith and membership of the Craft, famously writing to Leopold, shortly before the latter’s death, that death was the true goal of existence, the best and truest friend of mankind. No one would mistake this arrangement for the original, opening use of the swell pedal making that abundantly clear, but that is not the point; this captured much of its spirit and again served to highlight connections with Mozart’s writing for organ, as well as with Bach.
It was to Bach we returned for the final piece on the programme, Matthias Keller’s arrangement of the D minor Chaconne. The element of tour de force inherent not only in the original, but also, in very different ways, in the piano transcriptions by Brahms and Busoni, was perhaps not so apparent here, but there is by contrast a case to be made for occasional ‘normalisation’ too, like a less outrageous – much less outrageous – contribution to the school of Stokowski. Again, registration coloured the variations nicely, in a performance that gave a fine account both of piece and instrument. As an encore, we heard another Bach arrangement, this time a grateful, graceful version of the aria known in English as ‘Sheep may safely graze’.
