Mozart was born on
26 January 1756, so slightly ahead of
the game, there are plenty of anniversary
discs and books already available in
advance of the 250th anniversary
of his birth later next month.
This collection from
Warner Classics is a marvellous 16 disc
set of his chamber music; not all of
it but enough to reveal the wonders
of works written between 1772 and 1790,
in other words aged 16 to 34. They include
a handful of popular compositions such
as a refined and thoughtful performance
of Eine kleine Nachtmusik, under
Nikolaus Harnoncourt directing his Concentus
musicus string ensemble of Vienna. Full
of ideas, highly detailed in phrasing
on authentic instruments with brittle-toned
string sound and ‘squeezed’ long notes,
tempi for the middle movements are questionably
brisk, the trio begins with exaggerated
anacruses (upbeats) and proceeds in
a mannered fashion. The first movement
is what we are used to hearing, the
finale slightly slower. While the playing
is clean and impeccably detailed, it
all boils down to whether one likes
Harnoncourt’s interpretation or not.
Certainly his group’s playing - with
added pair of horns - of the Musical
Joke (K.522) brings out Mozart’s
wonderful sense of musical horseplay.
Here he caricatures his fellow Viennese
composers, their distinctly dull musical
material, coarse lack of inspiration
and inept technical facility, all diametrically
the opposite of his own genius. The
second movement - an extended minuet
and unusually the longest of the four
movements - says it all with its puffed
up pomposity and wrong note music (resulting
in dual tonality) in the distant horns.
This is followed by a completely different
‘trio’ with its demanding, florid violin
solo. The third movement has sudden
changes of dynamics, thus destroying
the opening reflective mood, while the
rollicking finale parodies pretty well
all that has gone before as well as
the art of producing counterpoint according
to the strict rules. Harnoncourt and
his players see the funny side, and
will make you smile to the truly revolting
last chords.
Mozart’s five piano
trios (i.e. for the combination of violin
and cello with piano) are pure joy,
especially the irresistible finale to
K.564. They were written at a time when
the composer was reaching his full musical
maturity between the two years 1786
and 1788, which produced the three great
operas Figaro, Don Giovanni
and Cosi fan tutte and the final
four symphonies, Prague to Jupiter.
The trios are notable for their musical
sophistication, and are by no means
to be dismissed as lightweight works.
I recommend listening to disc 3 where
K.564 is followed by the second Piano
Quartet K.493, the added viola highlighting
the thickening change of texture caused
by the additional instrument. The Trio
Fontenay give glittering accounts of
these trios, with distinctly fine piano
playing from Wolf Harden, while Dezsö
Ránki blends stylishly with members
of the Eder Quartet in K.493. Mozart’s
approach in this latter work - he only
wrote two piano quartets, either side
of Figaro in 1785 and 1786, and
this is the second - is one of novel
freshness. The finale Rondo (after a
pivotal and melodically rich Larghetto)
is seemingly the most innovative movement,
in which the piano is heard as an equal
partner to the other three instruments.
Possibly it was because the public found
the composer’s two piano quartets hard
to listen to - they wanted music you
could chat to, and not music that made
you think - that he took that combination
no further.
K.254 (1776) raises
an interesting question. Why is it called
a divertimento, when clearly it is a
piano trio? Actually it is more of a
violin sonata, for the cello has just
four bars (in the Rondo finale) where
it is independent of the piano’s left
hand. Only with the trio K.496 does
the cello take a part in the dialogue.
The sixth trio K.498 has novel scoring
of piano, viola and clarinet (Bruch
cleverly scored his Eight Pieces Op.83
for the same combination to get them
into chamber music recital programmes
alongside Mozart’s work). It was written
for Francisca, pianist daughter of the
Jacquin family, for clarinettist Anton
Stadler (for whom he also wrote the
clarinet quintet and concerto. Mozart
himself was a fine violist and consequently
wrote a technically challenging part.
It is known as the Kegelstatt
because Mozart allegedly wrote it while
playing ninepins, though there is no
evidence for this, nor the even more
apocryphal story that he composed Don
Giovanni while indulging in the
same pastime. Because the words ‘during
ninepins’ appear in the autograph of
a wind duet (K.487, not included in
this box), perhaps this amazing fact
was subsequently exaggerated to include
works of more substance. Whatever the
truth of the matter, the performance
here is notable for using Mozart’s own
fortepiano made by Anton Walter about
1780, and possibly his own viola, made
by Carlo Testore of Milan, both lovingly
played (understandably so) by András
Schiff and Erich Höbarth respectively.
The result is distinctive, colourful
and revealing. Listening to so much
of Mozart’s marvellous chamber music
as presented here, the words of Einstein
(musicologist Alfred that is, not Albert
of e=mc²) about the finale of the Kegelstatt
trio, ‘The last word music can utter
as an expression of the feeling of form
is here spoken’, are more than appropriate.
While the glorious
quintet for piano and winds (K.452)
is not included - and should have been,
for, as he wrote to his father Leopold
on 10 April 1784, ‘it’s the best work
I have ever composed’ - those for clarinet
and horn respectively are. Describing
Mozart’s music one soon runs out of
superlatives, try sublime for the horn
quintet and its especial scoring of
one violin, two violas and cello as
partners. David Pyatt makes easy work
of this charming three-movement music,
especially its tricky vivacious rondo-finale,
in a performance with secure top concert
E flats ringing out with bell-like clarity.
The Berlin Soloists recorded the clarinet
quintet in the rather over-resonant
acoustics of the Max Joseph Saal in
the Residenz, Munich, but nevertheless
it is a tenderly phrased and endearingly
played account of a glorious work.
String quartets are
represented by ten mature ones (Nos.
14-23) starting with the Spring
and including the Dissonance.
It was Haydn with his Op.33 quartets
of 1782 who inspired Mozart to write
six of his own in honour of his older
colleague and friend, describing them
as ‘the fruits of a long and laborious
endeavour’ rather than in response to
any patronage. K.499 stands alone, for
it was written just after Figaro,
and commissioned by and then named after
its publisher Hoffmeister. Three years
later he wrote his last three quartets,
known as the Prussian quartets
because they are dedicated to the cello-playing
Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm, and so the
cello part often takes centre-stage
- for example in the trio of K.575.
All ten are in the safe hands of the
Alban Berg Quartet, who give idiomatic
accounts recorded in the generously
warm ambience of Vienna’s Casino Zögernitz
over eighteen months in 1977-1978. This
is chamber music at its best, with immaculate
interplay between all four musicians,
notably in the fugal finale of K.387
and the trio of K.421. Then there’s
the wonderfully shaped unison start
of K.428, which sounds so chromatically
troubled, and the joyous opening of
K.458, the so-called Hunt quartet.
If Mozart’s occupation of the key-realm
of D minor produced dark, dramatic music
(such as K.421, the piano concerto K.466
and the Requiem), it is also true that
A major is a quantum leap away on the
emotional scale. Like another piano
concerto in A major (K.488), K.464 has
many sunny moments despite its pensive
ending. Indeed the second group of three
Haydn quartets are distinctly
lighter than the first half; that is
once the listener has emerged through
the confused chromaticism of the opening
of K.465 the so-called Dissonance
quartet, about which many a pen has
been put to paper. Like Beethoven’s
last quartets, both composers were years
ahead of their time. This miraculous
music is expertly played. That Mozart
was enjoying an outstanding period of
creativity in 1786 shines through in
the Hoffmeister quartet; all
was going well, including health, happiness
and even wealth, but all of which was
snatched from him by fate within five
years. Even so the two remaining Prussian
quartets have plenty of sunny moments
which seem to give lie to such developments,
while cellist Valentin Erben makes the
most of impersonating Kaiser Friedrich
Wilhelm in K.575’s trio. Mozart bids
farewell to the string quartet with
the finale of K.590, a vivacious allegro,
and played here with vigour and impeccably
attentive care by these fine players.
There are no fewer
than eighteen divertimenti, three of
them for strings. We are back to the
authentic world of string playing with
K.136, and I must confess to an aversion
to this stringy, squeezed first violin
line which dominates this style of playing.
Like nuclear weapons, one cannot un-invent
vibrato, and I miss it after a short
while. The remaining fifteen divertimenti
are for winds with no flutes, though
a pair of cor anglais appear in K.186,
while the five works constituting K.439b
(each of them having five movements
often due to a second minuet) are for
three basset horns. This was an instrument
Mozart loved but because by the turn
of the nineteenth century instruments
and players were becoming rare, alternative
versions (for a pair of clarinets and
a bassoon) became necessary. These compositions
were designed to delight, amuse and
entertain, which they do in spades throughout.
After the unison two bars of the opening
of the fourth of the K.439b set (CD15
track 6), there is a striking quote
from the opening of the finale to the
Jupiter symphony, the famous
four notes CDFE, and it comes as no
surprise to discover that both works
were written in 1788. The fifth divertimento
(and also the third movement of K.252)
has an unusual finale, a Polonaise.
The richly scored Gran
Partita for thirteen instruments
K.361, surely the pinnacle of Mozart’s
wind music, is played brilliantly, all
carefully tuned and producing a blend
of rich textures. A contrabassoon is
usually included, notwithstanding that
Mozart calls for a double bass and happily
this set respects his wishes. The early
non-traditional seven-movement Antretter
serenade is full of fun in this performance.
Flutes are included in this fully symphonic
work, which was commissioned by Judas
Antretter to mark his success in the
final examination of his academic studies
at Salzburg. Some of this wind music
rises above the social purposes for
which they were usually designed, particularly
the intense C minor serenade K.388,
and consequently it becomes chamber
rather than outdoor music. Which leaves
all the rest of the wind divertimenti,
the various serenades, including the
symphonic Haffner, and the enchantingly
novel Serenata notturna for strings,
trumpets and timpani. In these, and
in the other performances of the Wind
Soloists of the Chamber Orchestra of
Europe, whether in the lightweight earlier
works or in the more profoundly challenging
later compositions, are full of felicitous
touches (lovely oboe playing in K.196e
for example) and carefully blended sounds.
We need no anniversary excuses to hear
Mozart, for no ear ever tires of this
genius.
Christopher Fifield
