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.

Prom 9 - MCO/Andsnes - Beethoven and Stravinsky, 23 July 2015

Royal Albert Hall

Beethoven – Piano Concerto no.1 in C major, op.15

Stravinsky – Apollo

Beethoven – Piano Concerto no.4 in G major, op.58

Leif Ove Andsnes (piano, director)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra 

Copyright: BBC/Chris Christodoulou

 

With this concert, Leif Ove Andsnes and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra opened a three-concert survey of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos (plus the Choral Fantasy) and works by Stravinsky. The First Piano Concerto opened in highly promising fashion, the tutti offering variegated sound and an already-clear sense of goal-orientation. Andsnes’s tempo was probably fast ‘objectively’ but sounded ‘right’. This was a smallish orchestra, but there was no smallness of ambition. The turn to the minor mode gave a transformation of character, not just of tonality. I could have done without rasping ‘natural’ trumpets and hard kettledrum sticks, although what seems to be an increasingly popular post-modernist melange of instruments could by the same token have been worse. Upon the pianist’s entry, we heard clear kinship with the early piano sonatas. Transitional passages brought commendable flexibility; indeed, throughout, it was the liminal passages, rightly, which most intrigued, harmonies both telling and questioning. Bubbly woodwind solos were, quite simply, a joy.

 

In the Largo, I missed a larger body of strings; the sublimity of a Beethoven slow movement seems to demand greater cushioning. Woodwind and piano, however, sounded as gorgeous as ever. Line was securely, meaningfully maintained throughout, in  movement we heard as if in one breath. For better and for worse, mostly but not entirely for better, this was definitely a post-Abbado performance of Beethoven. Now if only one could somehow combine the virtues of this with the best of Daniel Barenboim… The finale truly sounded as a finale, its post-Mozartian inheritance explored to great advantage. Yes, it was fast, but it breathed. Episodes, moreover, seemed to breathe yet more life into the movement, just as they should.

Stravinsky at his ‘whitest’ followed. I cannot quite follow the logic of the particular Beethoven and Stravinsky pairings, but no matter. Led from the violin by Matthew Truscott (his ever-stylish solos truly excellent), the MCO adopted an unusual seating-and-standing arrangement: cellos seated in a semi-circle, other strings standing around them. Apollo is not my least favourite Stravinsky work; I do not actively dislike it, as I do Orpheus. Yet, the work’s manifest virtues notwithstanding, I cannot dissent from Boulez’s observation about the neo-Classical Stravinsky (at least at his most extreme) having fallen into the intellectual quicksands of others. At any rate, this was a fine performance, with, at times, more than a hint of similarly ‘white’ balletic Prokofiev. (Now there is a ‘difficult’ relationship between composers.) There was a keen sense of narrative from the Prologue onwards, the return to the initial tempo in the ‘Birth of Apollo’ bringing transformation to the opening material in the light of what had passed in the Allegro section.

The Muses joined Apollo’s violin as if truly compelled. This was not a cold performance, far from it, but Stravinsky’s polemical froideur remaind, as did the ‘unreality’ of the almost bizarrely – and surely deliberately so – tonal music: Boulezian quicksand maybe, but interesting quicksand. The Muses’ variations were well characterised without excess. Polyrhymnia sounded vividly balletic; Terpsichore seemed almost to ‘split the difference’ between her two sisters. Apollo’s Variation benefited from splendidly rich string sound – more of that in Beethoven too, please! – with the god’s emphatic alterity there for all to hear. It was in the Apotheosis that we heard the strongest real echoes of the (French) Baroque, although difference was nevertheless maintained. I may ultimately find the Webernised Rameau of Agon (or is it vice versa?) more to my taste, but this still made its point. Beautifully sensitive playing proved just as variegated as had been the case in Beethoven.

It was to Beethoven we now returned, with perhaps the very greatest, and certainly the most lovable, of all his piano concertos: the Fourth. Andsnes’s opening phrase seemed to offer a piano ‘without hammers’. The orchestral response was subtle, full of life. I do not think this was a larger string section – I did not count the players – but it sounded fuller of tone. There was certainly a strong sense, again unexaggerated, of the Beethovenian sublime, and the MCO’s woodwind section proved as remarkable as ever. The piano’s second entry reminded us that this was, in every sense, a concerto, not a symphony. It may have been in many respects an intimate performance, but it did not feel scaled down. As for Andsnes’s trills, his passagework: they were truly to die for! The exultant moment of return was again subtle but no less powerful for that.

The strings in the Andante con moto seemed very much to have taken to heart the oft-repeated comparison to the Furies. But need they have been so brusque? Gluck’s Furies are not, or at least should not be. There was, however, an undoubtedly heightened contrast with the piano’s melting tone as Orpheus. Again, those trills! The finale seemed especially alert to its subdominant provenance and to the continuing tension between tonal centres. Others will again doubtless have been keener on the trumpets and hard sticks than I was. Rhythms were spruce. Above all, harmonic motion was understood and communicated, syncopations working their magic in tandem. And yes, once again, those trills! A couple of Bagatelles as encores (op.119 no.8 and op.33 no.7) had us longing for more.