Lowe/Fisher/Mozartists/Page - Ordonez, Hasse, Mozart, Haydn, and Benda, 29 January 2025

Cadogan Hall

 

Karl von Ordonez: Symphony in G minor, Gm8
Hasse: La Danza: ‘Se tu non vedi’
Mozart: ‘Si mosra la sorte’, KV 209; ‘Con ossequio, con rispetto’, KV 210; ‘Voi avete un cor fedele’, KV 217
Haydn: Il ritorno di Tobia: ‘Quando mi dona un cenno’
Georg Anton Benda: Medea: extract
Haydn: Symphony no.67 in F major

Alexandra Lowe (soprano)

Alessandro Fisher (tenor)

The Mozartists

Ian Page (conductor)

Unable to attend this year's Salzburg Mozartwoche, I caught instead this fascinating concert of music from 1775 by The Mozartists (formerly Classical Opera Company) and their artist director Ian Page, joined by soprano Alexandra Lowe and tenor Alessandro Fisher at London’s Cadogan Hall. Chelsea is not Salzburg, although the site of the Mozarts’ home for a few weeks eleven years earlier on Ebury Street – then ‘Fivefields Row’, now Mozart Terrace – stands less than ten minutes’ walk away. 

It made for an enlightening alternative, though, nowhere more so than in a G minor symphony by the Viennese violinist and composer (both pursuits of his spare time) Karl von Ordonez. The first movement’s material was characterful and consequent; here, unquestionably, was someone who understood symphonic form rather than simply using it by default. Page’s chosen tempo sounded ideal. Work and performance alike showed counterpoint and harmony in excellent balance and interrelationship; one could well imagine the composer playing second violin, as remarked upon by Charles Burney, for Haydn quartets at the home of the British Ambassador a few years earlier. A warmly expressive Andante was not rushed, as is so often the case today. Indeed, it was difficult not to find many of these accomplished performances considerably more sympathetic than those of the ‘period style on modern instruments’ crowd, which have a tendency, not always but often, to offer the worst of both worlds. A duet for two solo violas made for an appealing surprise. The fast – but not too fast – and furious finale was closer to Haydn than Mozart, but certainly not to be reduced to or merely likened to him. The Mozartists’ unshowy rhetoric, properly rooted in Classical style, made a fine case for Ordonez, from whom I should be keen to hear more. Might we even hope one day for one of his two operas, or some sacred music?   

A sequence of arias followed: first, one of two from Hasse’s late cantata La Danza, to a text by Metastasio previously set by Giuseppe Bonno (1744) and, in extended form, Gluck as a one-act opera in 1755. Hasse’s final opera, Il Ruggiero, had a few years earlier (1771) been eclipsed by Mozart’s Ascanio in Alba at the Archduke Ferdinand’s wedding to Maria Beatrice d’Este. It was difficult not to hear some of the younger composer’s influence – yes, even at so tender an age – in this aural glimpse of Hasse’s Venetian retirement. Pastoral, though not generically so, the performance was again stylistically well situated, enabling Lowe’s character, Nice, to step forward from the text even in excerpted form. Her vibrato focused attention on the line rather than obscuring it, the Mozartists proved lively and supportive throughout. Should the aria be a little over-extended for some modern tastes, so much the worse for them; it held my attention throughout and, again, made me keen to hear more. 

The three Mozart arias are naturally better known, if hardly everyday encounters. The first two are tenor insertion arias from May 1775, the destination of ‘Si mostra la sorte’ still unknown. If the Hasse aria had come surprisingly close to Mozart, here was the real thing—and it sounded like it in music whose drama and lyricism were far from confined to Italianate performance of the vocal line, wooden flutes offering balm of their own. ‘Con ossequio, con rispetto,’ for Niccolò Piccinni ‘s L’astratto, fizzed in energetic contrast, again highly operatic in its creation of character. Lowe returned for ‘Voi avete un cor fedele’, written for Baldassare Galuppi’s Le nozze di Dorina, revealing writing that gave a remarkable impression of a greater drama and characterisation at least as striking as anything in the preceding Il re pastore. With splendidly expressive coloratura, this was rightly a performance on the grand scale. Haydn’s ‘Quando mi dona un cenno’ offered a rare, edifying opportunity to hear music from his ‘other’ oratorio, Il ritorno di Tobia and Fisher the chance, beautifully taken, to turn inward to expressivity of a different nature in a sweetly sung performance of striking emotional sincerity and estimable stylistic command.

Georg Anton Benda’s three melodramas are frequently cited in music histories, yet seldom heard in the concert hall. The English-language excerpt from Medea, Benda’s second, opened the second half. Lowe again showed herself a fine actress – I recalled a Pierrot lunaire from 2022 – from the offset: ‘I am still Medea…’. Stillness and horror prior to ‘It is done’ said it all, against a somewhat Gluck-like (for instance, the Don Juan music) musical cauldron. Here was another work I should love to encounter in full in the concert hall. 

Haydn’s received a performance of admirable clarity and purpose, only sometimes lacking a little in warmth. Its minuet was a little on the rushed and acetic sides and perhaps lacking in the harmonic grounding one finds in, say, Antal Doráti, although the lovely surprise (even when one ‘knows’) of the trio’s viola duet, in delightful echo of Ordonez, will surely have warmed many a heart. Similarly delightful was the element of surprise in the first movement’s development section, the exposition having done precisely what the term implies: delineating material and character in duly consequent fashion. ‘Hunting’ elements delighted in a dramatic, energetic account that exuded grace. If I am often sceptical of the value of employing natural horns, here their use brooked no argument. The second movement was likewise familiar—until one listened. Rhetorical flourishes were given their due without exaggeration. Certain characteristics seemed close to late Mozart, though of course it is the other way around. If I have heard performances of stronger ‘line’ in the finale, it brimmed with character, twists and turns generally well traced. Strings, led by Matthew Truscott, used and varied vibrato expressively. Whatever my odd cavil, here was a performance of numerous delights to conclude a concert of many more.

Mozartists/Page - Haydn, Applausus, 15 March 2018

Cadogan Hall

Haydn: Applausus, Hob. XXIVa:6 (UK public premiere)

Ellia Laugharne (soprano)

Elspeth Marrow (mezzo-soprano)

Thomas Elwin (tenor)

John Savournin (bass-baritone)

David Shipley (bass)

It is not every day one attends a Haydn premiere, even if only a UK public premiere. Haydn’s Applausus, written 250 years ago, for the fiftieth anniversary of a Cistercian Abbot’s vows, seems never to have been performed again until 1958, for a BBC studio recording under Harry Newstone, the soprano one Joan Sutherland. (She must have relished the coloratura!) Despite a few performances elsewhere in the meantime, and three recordings, it does not seem to have been performed in concert in this country until now.

Was it worth the wait? Unquestionably, although I fear that contemporary audiences, longing for superficially ‘exciting’ substitute film music, will not necessarily react kindly or even comprehendingly to a celebration of monastic virtues on a suitably monastic time-frame. There is no plot of which to speak; the work might almost be characterised as an allegory without an allegory. There can certainly be no questioning the quality of the music in this cantata. (Would it fare any better if we called it an oratorio, the two terms being more or less interchangeable? Hummel, after all, recorded The Seasons as an ‘oratorio’ in his 1806 catalogue of the Esterházy collection.) Conductor Ian Page offers sage advice, moreover due food for thought, when he writes, ‘If an aria is beautiful, why should it bother us if it lasts for more than ten minutes? If the same line of text is repeated a couple of dozen times, how do these repetitions affect us as we consider and contemplate the text? How should we best prepare ourselves for the experience of listening to a complete performance of the work?’ It would be interesting to know how it would fare in an abbet such as that at Zwettl, in Lower Austria, for which it was written. How would the acoustic and the visual experience of the architecture shape our experience? In the meantime, though, this concert hall experience gave a fine account. So too did Classical Opera’s splendid documentation, the concert programme a model of its kind, with an excellent note by Page, as well as an important reproduction of a letter by Haydn concerning the work.

By way of an introduction to the opening recitativo accompagnato, we heard, as seems often to have been the case in the work’s relatively few performances, the first two movements of Haydn’s Symphony no.38 in C major. Hand on heart, my preference remains for modern instruments in such music, but it is always good thing from time to time to revisit one’s preferences and prejudices, and I found much to jolt me from ‘modern’ complacency in the sound, especially from the wind instruments. The Mozartists, Classical Opera’s ‘period’ band, certainly sounded preferable to my ears to the current, peculiar fashion for mixing and matching modern and period instruments. Even the echoes of the second movement, marked by a certain intonational fragility, were well shaped enough to render that fragility more touching than anything else. And there was something to the sound, here and elsewhere, that brought the music close to the world of the eighteenth-century – and not just Haydn’s – Missa solemnis figuraliter, trumpets, drums, and all. The opening of that first recitative, moreover, seemed to speak of Handel, even if this were similarity rather than influence as such. (The period of Handel’s true influence on Haydn, nurtured by Gottfried van Swieten’s Vienna concerts of alte Musik, lay a good few years in the future.)

By the time we reached the first quartet, ‘Virtus inter ardua quaerit habitare,’ there was, moreover, little doubt concerning the quality of the soloists either. The coordination and blend of their often highly melismatic writing was second to none. Ellie Laugharne’s silver-toned soprano and Elspeth Marrow’s richer mezzo proved well matched and contrasted; Thomas Elwin’s fresh, truly Mozartian – for that matter, Haydnesque – tenor proved fully equal to the extraordinary challenges Haydn afforded him, especially later on in two highly ornate arias of truly ‘heavenly length’. John Savournin’s bass-baritone and David Shipley’s bass likewise offered a pleasing degree of comtrast, the former truly coming in to his own in the rage aria, ‘Si obtrudat ultimam,’ the latter ably handling the fascinating tonal plan of the first aria of all, ‘Non chymaeras somnitatis’. Harpsichordist Steven Devine and violinist Steven Devine offered fine solo work too. Throughout, one could only marvel at the care lavished by Haydn on this more or less unknown music, never to be heard again in his lifetime. Page’s tempi were judicious; this is not music to be hurried, let alone harried, nor was it in practice.

The closing chorus, here taken as quintet, is an ‘Amen’ in all but name – and words. It is a delightful one at that, and proved a true culmination, a point of arrival. ‘I hope,’ Haydn wrote in the aforementioned letter, ‘that this Applausus will please the poet, the worthy musicians, and honourable revered Auditorio, all of whom I greet with profound respect.’ It certainly pleased this member, honourable and revered or otherwise, of the Auditorio, who hopes against hope that he will not have to wait too long until the next audition.