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Mozart and Webern: Fazιl Say (piano) and Ensemble Resonanz. Laeiszhalle Hamburg, 25.2.2009 (TKT) 

Webern: Movement for String Orchestra in D minor (op. post.)
Mozart: Piano Concerto in C Major, K467
Webern: Five Movements, op.5 (version for string orchestra)
Mozart: Piano Concerto in D major, Coronation, K537


Mozart and Webern in one concert? If you follow the organizers, listening to each composer helps to hear the other one in a new way. There is a certain historical logic to this: what started with the First Viennese School, (G C Wagenseil et al), the Mannheim School (J and C Stamitz et al) and a little help from J S Bach’s sons, eventually led to Viennese Classicism by ringing in the Age of Sentiment, introducing the “gallant style” and developing the structure of the sonata movement, which was also adopted for symphonies and solo concertos. Anton Webern, on the other hand, was a member of the Second Viennese School around Arnold Schoenberg, which developed 12-tone music, a way of composing which regards all twelve notes of the chromatic scale as equal, denying the conventional hierarchy of notes. This effectively denies our desire to have dissonances be resolved in consonances (which consist of the hierarchically superior notes). Small wonder that audiences have had enormous difficulty with 12-tone music, which has never become part of popular culture.

It is true that we hear, say, Debussy differently after a Brahms symphony than after a work by Schoenberg: we are more likely to hear the dissonant sounds Debussy created to paint his musical pictures. Yet, today our perception of what is and what is not dissonant has changed so thoroughly, simply leaving out some of the notes of a chord – a device Mozart used in his C major concerto – no longer suffices for us to hear a dissonance. No amount of Webern can re-train our ear that drastically. 

Still, the combination of Mozart and Webern worked, for the simple reason that Webern’s pieces are quite beautiful – and how many people would you draw into a concert hall by announcing Webern alone? The Movement in D minor is a neoromantic fragment, which was recorded for the first time a few years ago, by Festival Strings Lucerne, and is utterly evocative and deserves to be discovered. The Five Movements are full of contrasts, drama, and a wide range of emotions and timbres, which the Ensemble Resonanz rendered with great clarity.

Fazιl Say is a third-generation disciple of the Second Viennese School, as it were: his father, a respected musicologist in Turkey, studied with Theodor W. Adorno who, like Webern, in turn had studied with Schoenberg. Say’s Mozart is certainly not the ethereal, childlike composer we often hear, but rooted in this earth: bubbly, extraverted, full of joie de vivre, and masculine. Say, who is not only an accomplished composer but also an extremely gifted improviser, played his own cadenzas with great chutzpah and such irreverence, he sometimes stayed just this side of musical caricatures. He mastered the quiet, tender sounds but largely stunned listeners with his extreme dexterity, especially in the D major concerto, an unspectacular work but a bottomless source of Mozart melodies. Would the composer have approved? Says’s performance may not be what he had in mind, but no doubt Mozart would have enjoyed this fresh interpretation – and after all, Say was a great deal more Mozart than Mozart was Turkish in his Rondo alla turca. 

The audience was noticeably uplifted. It was treated to three sweeping encores: Mozart’s Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman at breakneck speed, Alla Turca Jazz (the title says it all), and Say’s own Black Earth, a dark and haunting composition based on a Turkish ballad about loss and loneliness.

Thomas K Thornton


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