SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Mozart Birthday Celebration:  Members of the Seattle Symphony, Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall, Benaroya Hall, Seattle 26.1.2010 (BJ)

Just a day early, a bevy of Seattle Symphony musicians gathered to celebrate Mozart’s 254th birthday with a program nicely calculated to cover the range, from dramatic intensity to sheer frivolity, of one of music’s greatest creators.

The intensity was preeminently on display in the first and last works on the program. The Oboe Quartet is a mostly fluent and graceful charmer, but its slow movement mines the vein of passionate drama that Mozart always found in the key of D minor. Similarly, the Olympian serenity of the C-major String Quartet, K. 465, comes as telling contrast after the harmonic labyrinth of its chromatically involuted slow introduction.

Except for the players’ regrettable omission of second-half repeats in both of the first movements, the two works received compelling, stylish, and highly satisfying performances. Stefan Farkas’s oboe sang eloquently in partnership with violinist Emma McGrath, violist Susan Gulkis Assadi, and cellist Meeka Quan DiLorenzo. The last-named returned to partner violinists Gennady Filimonov and Artur Girsky and violist Arie Schachter for K. 465.

In between, we had heard two other strongly contrasted compositions. The orchestra’s concertmaster, Maria Larionoff, and its pianist, Kimberly Russ, joined forces for an assured and rich-toned reading of the B-flat-major Sonata, K. 570–actually Mozart’s penultimate piano sonata, but heard this time with a probably inauthentic but enjoyable violin part.

What was absolutely at the farthest remove from “serious music” was the second piece in the program’s first half. This was Mozart pretending to be a helpless bungler–A Musical Joke, in which he lampooned all the excesses, inanities, and incompetences perpetrated by the less skillful composers and performers of his day. Here Ms. Mcgrath, Ms. Gulkis Assadi, violinist Mae Lin, and cellist Roberta Hansen Downey got together with the orchestra’s associate principal and assistant principal horn-players, Mark Robbins and Susan Carroll, to let their hair down in the most delightful fashion.

Coming just a few days after Nicholas McGegan’s brilliantly entertaining baroque program with the orchestra, this performance was another welcome reminder that classical music can be not only inspiring and elevating–it can also be tremendous fun. Susan Gulkis Assadi, in particular, revealed previously unsuspected talents as a sit-down and later a stand-up comic. In the slow movement the horns are silent, so Mr. Robbins and Ms. Carroll popped the cork on a nice bottle of something that actually looked pretty revolting to drink, and proceeded to read newspapers and magazines for all the world as if they were enjoying one of the quieter moments in a film-recording session. (Yes, I’ve seen very eminent musicians doing just that.)

The players clearly had a great time. So did a near-capacity audience, and so did I.

Bernard Jacobson