SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Mozart, Strauss and Wagner: Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Mitsuko Uchida (director/piano) Royal Festival Hall, London 5.11.2007 (JPr)

Mozart:  Piano Concertos No.19 & No.20
Strauss: Metamorphosen
Wagner: Siegfried Idyll

It would be interesting to know how this intriguing musical programme originated. It had a sort of arc structure with the second half in many ways a mirror image of the first. Also,  by juxtaposing Strauss’s Metamorphosen and Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll it became clearer than ever that the former owes so much to the latter.

When I first noticed the concert I saw that Mitsuko Uchida was director/pianist with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and I took that to mean the conductor for the entire concert but that, as we will see, was purely a naïve assumption on my part.

Uchida needs little introduction and has often spoken of how she was brought up listening to her father's collection of classical recordings by European composers but how it was Mozart she listened to ‘again and again’. When she was 12 her family moved to Vienna and this was a turning point in her life. Vienna, of course, is where Mozart composed and it was  in Vienna, while continuing her musical studies under Richard Hauser at the Vienna Academy of Music, that this Japanese ambassador's daughter could at last satisfy her intellectual curiosity about the culture of Western music. She must have impressed her music teacher, for only two years later she performed her first concert at the Vienna Musikverein and the rest is – as they say – history. While she has broadened her musical palette over the years it is for her Mozart than Uchida is best known.

This intriguing evening opened with the first of the two Mozart Piano Concertos, No.19 in F, K.459. Mozart's own personal catalogue of his works lists this concerto as having been completed on 11 December 1784 and it was the last of the six that he had composed that year. Asked how he was able to produce so much music so quickly he replied: ‘As you can imagine, I must play some new works and therefore I must compose.’ This musical genius  toured Europe  when a child protégé of 6 years old with his father Leopold and sister Nannerl. He performed party tricks including free extemporisation and demonstrated his keyboard dexterity. Some consider that by 1784 Mozart was moving on from a need to produce inconsequential, entertainment pieces but I found this concerto a little bland. One could admire Uchida’s light touch on the keyboard, her musicality and dazzling pianistic skills and there was plenty of charm expressed in the central Allegretto. Overall the account was a joy but all emphases seemed to have been ironed out and it was all rather polite. Perhaps that is what Mozart wanted? In between her piano contributions Uchida cajoled her excellent Chamber Orchestra of Europe by pointed gestures or outstretched hands : dressed in some diaphanous creation with a hint of mauve and silk slacks, she made  me think of her as a large damsel fly.

Then came the pairing of Strauss’s Metamorphosen and Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll. I have heard Metamorphosen a number of times lately and written much about it elsewhere on this site in reviews. This is his post-war string soliloquy but for what … and after this concert I wondered …for whom? Is it his beloved lost German opera houses or the lost German ‘Ideal’ and is he actually saying farewell to ‘Siegfried’ himself as the ‘Ideal German’? This cannot be explored now but hearing these works side-by-side with just an interval between them makes it clear how connected they are.

The piano was moved and Strauss’s 23 strings were present – ten violins, five each of violas and cellos and 3 double basses. Each instrument has its independent melodic line, although occasionally instruments are doubled for emphasis. Strauss’s frame of mind can be guessed from thematic references to the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony that poignantly ends the work. It surprised me when they began without a conductor and the musicians were unobtrusively guided by their leader Alexander Janiczek. More than I had heard beforem  the first part seemed triumphant, no less so than the Siegfried Idyll in a way that says that Strauss is trying to tell us that a cause was just but then is mourning over the outcome.

The Siegfried Idyll does not end on a downer: quite the opposite in fact as it exultantly presages the consummation between Siegfried and Brünnhilde. This offers the prospect of the continuance of the lineage of heroic Germans in much  the same way that the composition of this music occurred (in part)  to celebrate the birth of Wagner’s only son, named Siegfried. Alexander Janiczek  led an expansive account of the Idyll where tempi did tend to drift just a bit whuch made the similarity between the Strauss and the Wagner even more  obvious. With so little direction,  the  40 or so musicians involved  revealed their virtuosity with a remarkable unity of purpose, perfect intonation and exquisite tone.

Back came the piano and Mitsuko Uchida for Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.20 in D minor, K.486 which,  according to the composer, was completed on 10 February 1785. A few days after the first performance, the composer's father, Leopold, visiting in Vienna, wrote to  Nannerl: "[I heard] an excellent new piano concerto by Wolfgang, on which the copyist was still at work when we got there, and your brother didn't even have time to play through the rondo because he had to oversee the copying operation. "  Leopold also  reported  about the successful first performance,  "The concert was magnificent and the orchestra played splendidly." This concert was the first of six that Mozart would give on six consecutive Fridays from 11 February through to 18 March. They were an artistic and financial triumph and amongst the subscribers were members of the most influential Austrian families. Almost anyone, whom Mozart might have wished to have favourably influence his career, attended these concerts. They resulted in two prosperous years for him, years that would peak in 1787 with Le nozze di Figaro. 1785 and the ensuing years, more than any others, justified Mozart's faith in himself and his determination to make his way in Vienna.

Of all the 27 piano concertos that  Mozart wrote, No.20 remains particularly significant for its importance  for other pianists and composers. Beethoven included it in his own repertoire, and would compose solo cadenzas for it, as Mozart, in his haste, had not written his own, but  improvised them at  performances. Brahms, too, composed cadenzas, and all this now gives modern pianists several impressive options as they prepare their own interpretations.

I am not sufficiently musically literate to identify the cadenzas Uchida chose to play but in the third movement it seemed strikingly Beethovenian. Uchida’s playing had a wider dynamic than in No 19 and was more nuanced,  revealing the richer sonorities of this work. With its brooding undertones,  this music  reminded me not only of the statue scene from Don Giovanni but also the trials scene in Act II of Die Zauberflöte, both yet to be composed.

The Chamber Orchestra of Europe played splendidly throughout the evening as an ensemble seemingly telepathically linked. It is invidious to pick out individuals but vital contribution came not only from Alexander Janiczek but also the violinist Sophie Besançon next to him, as well as from flautist, Jaime Martin and oboist Emmanuel Abbuhl. These last two particularly revealed the warm lyrical heart thar winds provide for the two concertos where the interplay with Uchida’s piano is there almost by way of an obbligato at times.


Jim Pritchard

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