Salzburg Mozartwoche (2) – Apkalna: Mozart, Bach, Vasks, and Pärt, 23 January 2026

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

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’.

'Morning Star' - The Gesualdo Six, 20 December 2024

Wigmore Hall

Palestrina (arr. Willcocks): Matin Responsory
Lassus: Conditor alme siderum
Praetorius: Nun, komm der Heiden Heiland a 6
Sally Beamish: In the stillness
Jacobus Händl: Mirabile mysterium
Cheryl Frances-Hoad: The Promised Light of Life
Plainchant: Rorate coeli
Byrd: Rorate coeli
Poulenc: O magnum mysterium
Anon (arr. Praetorius): Es ist ein Ros entsprungen
Anon: Angelus ed virginem
Plainchant: Ecce advenit
Cornelius: Weihnachtslieder, op.8: no.3, ‘Die Könige’
Eccard: Maria wallt zum Heiligtum
Clemens non Papa: Magi veniunt
Arvo Pärt: Morning Star
Judith Bingham: In Mary’s love
Plainchant: Vidimus stellam
Lassus: Tribus miraculis
Owain Park: O send out thy light
Bob Chilcott: The Shepherd’s Carol


Alasdair Austin, Guy James (countertenors)
Josh Cooter (tenor)
Joseph Wicks (tenor)
Michael Craddock (baritone)
Owain Park (artistic director, bass)

The eve of the shortest day of 2024 was especially miserable in London: cold, wet, and dark. All the more need, then, for an aural glimpse of the ‘Morning Star’ that gave its name to this Wigmore Hall concert from The Gesualdo Six. Rather than concentrate on Advent, Christmas, or Epiphany, the programme took us from one through another to the third. Indeed, it perhaps tried to do too much in too many pieces, a succession of very different, generally short music in some cases more merging into one than showing affinity and connection, though there were certainly exceptions to that. A packed audience, though, clearly enjoyed its evening, nowhere more so than in an encore performance of Jingle Bells, arranged by Gordon Langford. ‘Style’ might seem an unduly pretentious attribute, but for me it pointed out what had sometimes been missing elsewhere, certain standout pieces offering welcome relief. Perhaps a church acoustic would have imparted a warmer blend, or perhaps I was simply not in the right mood, but there were times – and I realise this is a matter of taste more than anything else – when relief in the guise of female voices might have helped. 

I had reservations, then, but this was also an opportunity to hear a good range of repertoire from chant to Palestrina to the present day, in the guise of artistic director Owain Park’s own O send out thy light, gratefully written for the group, in which instance they were clearly very much at home. Palestrina had appeared at the opening, in the guise of David Willcocks’s well-known arrangement of a Nunc dimittis as a Mattins responsory. Many will surely have recognised it in one guise or another, and it made for a fitting opening, followed by well if slightly anonymously sung Lassus (how I felt about a later example too) and more florid Praetorius, Nun komm der Heiland, which to my ears gave a more arresting impression. Plainchant and ‘Anon.’ often fared best, I think, deceptive simplicity permitting performances and their reception to hone in on melody and words, the mediaeval carol Angelus ad virginem gathering voices in a warm conclusion to the first half. 

Other highlights for me included the extraordinary wandering chromatic lines of Jacobus Händl’s Mirabile mysterium. They are anything but easy to sing, yet intonation never proved a problem. Nor did it in Poulenc’s O magnum mysterium, which emerged a little later as fitting complement in stillness and movement, although this was one of those cases when I felt the loss of women’s (or even children’s) voices. The expressive accomplishment of Byrd’s Rorate coeli was highly welcome, perhaps a first-half counterpart to the second-half highpoint of Clemens non Papa’s euphonious and, no coincidence, more extended Ephipany Magi veniunt. It was preceded by Joannes Eccard’s Maria wallt zum Heiligtum which likewise benefited from a degree more warmth. 

None of the twenty-first-century pieces seemed concerned with straining at the edges of modernity, Sally Beamish’s In the stillness purposefully reticent, almost belying the skill with which verbal and musical cadences coincided. Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Judith Bingham ventured further harmonically, the former a rare if doubtless coincidental instance of seeming to take its leave from its predecessor (Händl), the latter another welcome case of painting on a slightly larger canvas, which if not exactly ‘Romantic’ was not exactly un-Romantic either. Arvo Pärt’s Morning Star, well crafted and performed with sympathy, readily laid bare idea and processes. A somewhat dour Cornelius ‘Three Kings’, sung in English, suggested that the nineteenth century was in generally better avoided; unless, that is, we count Jingle Bells.

 

'Hymns to the Virgin': Tallis Scholars/Phillips - Lassus, Josquin, Guerrero, Martin, Stravinsky, Pärt, and Isaac, 21 December 2021

St John’s Smith Square

Lassus: Alma redemptoris mater
Josquin: Missa Ave maris stella
Guerrero: Maria Magdalene et altera Maria; Ave virgo sanctissima
Matthew Martin: Sanctissima
Stravinsky: Bogoroditse devo
Pärt: Virgencita
Isaac: Virgo prudentissima

Tallis Scholars
Peter Phillips (director)

St John’s Smith Square’s 36th Christmas Festival has gone ahead as planned. That in itself is something to grant seasonal cheer, especially at what again is proving a trying time for all of us. So too was this concert from festival regulars the Tallis Scholars, with music spanning a period of more than half a millennium, from Josquin’s Missa Ave maris stella in the late fifteenth century to Matthew Martin’s 2017 reimagining of Francesco Guerrero’s motet Ave virgo santissima, first published in 1566.

The concert opened with Lassus’s polychoral motet, Alma redemptoris mater, separation and recombination of the two ‘choirs’ (four singers apiece) taking place in typically patient, unshowy unfolding from Peter Phillips and his singers. Like much of the evening’s programme, it sounded bathed in Marian radiance, albeit of distinctly different varieties that yet all remained worlds distant from the concerted likes of Monteverdi or Mozart. In context, Lassus’s eight-part antiphon—he also set the text for five and, twice, six voices—sounded almost as if an overture.

If so, it was an overture to the mass honouring the five hundredth anniversary of the death of Josquin des Prez. We heard a properly responsorial ‘Kyrie’, its opening upward fifth signalling to all and sundry the cantus firmus that permeates so much of the setting in a motivic fashion it is difficult not to think of as ‘modern’, however problematic and ultimately unsatisfactory the notion may be. The ‘Gloria’ offered a not entirely dissimilar sense of unfolding and building towards climax such as we had heard in Lassus. Words were never underlined, yet nonetheless ‘spoke’ as Phillips and the Tallis Scholars traced, even inhabited Josquin’s work’s musical contours. (And no, it does not seem to me anachronistic here to speak of a musical work.) A glowing, full-toned ‘Sanctus’ contrasted nicely with the duets of the ‘Benedictus’. The crowning canonical writing of the ‘Agnus Dei’, canons recalling earlier writing and seemingly underlining the form of threefold petition, was permitted a sense of the expansive: in performance as in work, one might say. At any rate, there was a sense not only of conclusion but of culmination, without attempting to transplant later values not at home here.

Following the interval, we turned to two motets by Guerrero. His Maria Magdalene et altera Maria tells of that celebrated discovery on Easter morning. Here were a different voice, method, and subject matter; a different radiance too, I think. Yet again, there was that sense of patient unfolding and building unobtrusively towards a fine climax on ‘surrexit’. Our Saviour was risen indeed. There was a graver, more hymnal beauty to be heard and felt in Ave virgo sanctissima. Indeed, the prayerful quality in which I felt involved, no mere observer, imparted a sense of physical and metaphysical kneeling. Romantic nonsense, perhaps, though harmless if so. Martin’s reimagining, written to accompany the original, had Guerrero’s lines travel in lines of refracted, relative dissonance, within a tonal framework. Intonation sounded spot on, as surely it must be. It was rather lovely to hear in context.

The radical simplicity of Stravinsky’s Bogoroditse Devo quite simply brooked no dissent, as jewel-like an ‘object’ as, say, the Octet. It simply ‘was’—and doubtless will be. Arvo Pärt’s Virgencita took a lot longer to say rather less, yet the performance was one of evident fondness, warmth and patience bringing ‘holy minimalist’ process to the fore. Some attractive, almost Poulenc-like chords (in abstracto, not functionally), quite resplendent in performance, made the time pass more quickly. The encore, Pärt’s minute-long setting of the same Old Slavonic text set by Stravinsky was written for King’s College Cambridge's Service of Nine Lessons of Carols. The singers imparted a welcome sense of carolling dance to its despatch.

In between we heard Heinrich Isaac’s magnificent Virgo prudentissima, making the case for Archduke—soon Emperor—Maximilian’s piety, the Virgin his heavenly advocate. When compared with, say, Josquin, display of musical intellect seemed more overt. Canonic procedures came more strongly to the fore, propelling words in a fashion that had very much its own direction and directedness. Not for nothing did Webern write his dissertation on Isaac. This was an arresting polyphonic and cosmogonic tour past dominions, fiery cherubim, angels, archangels and others both above and below, to the Mother of Heaven and thence to Him who had taken her up. Yet we fittingly returned to her, ‘excellent as the Sun’, and sounding so. Hierarchies of music and theology created and reinforced one another, preparing us, so it seemed, for further, Christmas mysteries.