Grosses Festspielhaus
Mendelssohn: Overture: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, op.21
Mozart: Masonic Funeral Music, KV 471
Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E minor, op.64
Mozart: Idomeneo, re di Creta, KV 366: Overture
Beethoven: Symphony no.2 in D major, op.36
María Dueñas (violin)
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| Images: Wolfgang Lienbacher |
My final Mozartwoche concert this year presented a frustrating conclusion. The starriest events are far from always the best: as Brahms might have said, any ass can tell you that. This was certainly not to be attributed to any failing on the Vienna Philharmonic’s part: it played and sounded wonderful throughout, alert, warm, and stylish. My problems lay rather with much, though not all, of what we heard from soloist and conductor, though it is only fair to add that the Festspielhaus audience reacted more positively.
The Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture worked well, as did the other shorter pieces on the programme. It is quite simply a delight to hear elfin strings and forest woodwind play like this. Here at least Karina Canellakis was reluctant to impose herself on the music: the last thing Mendelssohn wants. Moments of exhaustion at the end of the development and at the close of the piece, typical of Mendelssohn’s practice in general but with clear, programmatic meaning in this case, was handled beautifully and seeped into the following magical chords in a way I cannot recall hearing before. Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music exhibited not dissimilar virtues, though was naturally less driven. It flowed as if a wordless piece of sacred music, which it essentially is, and the VPO wind once again shone. The cantus firmus could be heard meaningfully as the focus of all that was woven around it: music, as Mendelssohn put it more generally of the art, that is not too vague but too precise for words.
Alas, I found it difficult to get on with María Dueñas in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, nervy vibrato that sometimes veered into wayward intonation married to a darker sound than either seemed intrinsically appropriate or was offered by the orchestra. Perhaps it was telling that, in a vigorous first movement, the cadenza came off best. Once the orchestra had returned, the soloist sounded increasingly overwrought: again, at odds with general tone and style. That turned to a general unevenness of tone in the long lines of the slow movement, however excellent the orchestral playing. The high spirits of the finale came off best, though Canellakis at times drove too hard. It was in any case all a bit late.
In the second half, the Idomeneo Overture got off to a good start, the VPO sounding wonderfully as of old. It might almost have been the same orchestra as we hear on John Pritchard’s 1983 recording. Direct and involving, it was very much the dramatic curtain-raiser; that is, until Canellakis began to pull it around to its detriment. It was a pity, but unfortunately prophetic of the Beethoven Second Symphony to come. Again, the playing was almost beyond praise, but the first movement introduction was oddly wayward. Rather than straining towards something, it verged on wandering off piste. The exposition and what came after was a mix of the hard-driven and the arbitrary. Above all, this was a Beethoven, like so much of what we hear now, that seemed divested of meaning at a time when we need his message more than ever. The other movements told a similar tale. After slow movement that wandered around until it stopped, with little to show for it, and in which the VPO seemed to have lost interest by the end, the minuet and finale offered more the same. Beautiful woodwind solos notwithstanding, how we had got there and why remained a mystery.
