SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

There was a time in my life when “exciting” was the highest term of approval I could accord a musical performance. Then I grew up. Since excitement was almost the only positive attribute to the performances at this concert in the Seattle Symphony’s “Mainly Mozart” series, the consequence was an evening of excesses and shortcomings that left me largely unsatisfied.

 

In the case of the 36-year-old Argentinian pianist Ingrid Fliter, who arrived for her local debut having garnered golden opinions elsewhere, the concerto she was asked to play may have been the problem. Certainly presenting your credentials with Haydn’s D-major Concerto is a tough job: Haydn came nowhere rivaling even the teen-aged Mozart in mastery of the concerto form, and this is a merely pleasant work that offers little scope for interpretative insights.

 

However that may be, Ms. Fliter went at the outer movements hammer and tongs. She proved that she knows her way about the keyboard. But rushed tempos, though they built up formidable nervous tension, left no room for the quality that may (in the absence of any one English word that accurately denotes the combination of warmth, charm, and relaxation) be called Gemütlichkeit. It was only in the central Un poco Adagio that we were afforded a glimpse of the soloist’s virtues, with playing that had poise, elegance, and a clarity of tone free from the harshness occasioned elsewhere in the work.

 

Conductor James Gaffigan, born in New York in 1979 and also making his debut with the orchestra, set similarly dashing tempos in Mendelssohn’s Sinfonia No. 12 and in Mozart’s D-major Divertimento, K. 136, and Symphony No. 29. The slow movements had an agreeably airy grace, but the quick ones paid the price of excess, with ensemble that occasionally teetered on the edge of untidiness, and string articulation that, in the main theme of the symphony’s finale, degenerated into gabble; I doubt whether anyone hearing it for the first time would have been able to hear what the notes were. The orchestra did its skillful best, to keep up, John Cerminaro and Adam Iascone in particular achieving the purest of intonation with their often stratospheric horn parts.

 

In conclusion, I cannot condone Mr. Gaffigan’s evident belief that he knows more about musical form than Mozart, fully half of whose instructions to repeat a section he disregarded. This damaged both formal balance and expressive rhetoric, reinforcing the general sense of haste and superficiality.

 

Bernard Jacobson

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