An exuberant “Jupiter” highlights MOB’s Mozart season-opener
Music of the Baroque opened its 56th season with an all-Mozart repast. Dame Jane Glover led the ensemble in “Mozart at the Summit,” a program spotlighting three of the Austrian composer’s final masterworks Monday night at the Harris Theater.
The evening led off with the Symphony No. 40 in G minor. Glover has long been one of our finest Mozart conductors and MOB’s longtime music director led a typically committed and well-balanced performance.
Yet the results on this occasion proved surprisingly routine. While the outer movements went with an all-purpose vigor, the string playing was too soft and unfocused for such a dramatic, tragic work as K. 550, wanting in bite and incisiveness. Overall the playing of the chamber orchestra forces felt lightweight and a size too small for the music. Only the Andante rose above the routine— some errant violin intonation apart—plumbing an apt vein of pensive introspection with greater expressive point and instrumental detailing.
No guest soloist has appeared more times with Music of the Baroque than Glover’s friend and fellow Dame of the British Empire, Imogen Cooper. The 77-year-old pianist announced her retirement in January and Monday night’s concert was Cooper’s’s farewell U.S. appearance.
For her seventh and final MOB stand—all but one in music of Mozart— Cooper performed the composer’s Piano Concerto No. 27, his last work in the genre.
On paper Mozart’s K.595 seemed like an apt vehicle for Cooper’s adieu, a late work imbued with spare melodies and an atmosphere of leave-taking.
The pianist’s playing was refined and idiomatic, characteristic of previous MOB Mozart performances, albeit with some stiff passagework and less security than in her prime. There were digital lapses in the final moment and a slip in the opening solo of the Andante.
One would think that on this occasion Cooper would mine some of the expressive potential of that extraordinary slow movement but she remained a cool, aristocratic Mozartian to the last. Tempos were brisk with little lingering from Cooper even in the Andante’s elegiac main theme, as if to say, “There’ll be none of that soppy stuff here!”
The pianist’s stiff-upper-lip Mozart seemed more in synch with the skipping, children’s song-like finale, which, with typically alert accompaniment by Glover and the chamber orchestra, rounded off Cooper’s swan-song on a buoyant note.
The concert concluded with Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, his final work in the genre aka, the “Jupiter.” If the first half of the program proved mixed, Glover and colleagues quickly showed they were in the zone, fairly leaping into the first movement’s brilliant main theme.
Glover’s Mozartian bona fides were on full display in this performance. Skillfully paced with ideal tempos throughout and generous with repeats, Glover gave the work its full scale, mining the expressive potential of each movement. The Andante cantabile was especially fine, Glover’s shaping of the phrases conveying the sense of subsumed tragedy beneath the Rococo elegance.
The celebrated finale went with whirlwind brilliance across all sections of the ensemble. Glover and the players were fully engaged, one paragraph leading seamlessly into the next with propulsive energy, and all repeats observed.
The famous final section where all five of the movement’s themes are played simultaneously—a feat of remarkable contrapuntal legerdemain even for Mozart—could have used an extra push and sense of climax, but this was still an enjoyable and exhilarating performance.
NOTE: A MOB spokeswoman said Tuesday that a technical issue with the piano caused problems Monday with both the action of the keys and the tuning of some notes during Imogen Cooper’s concerto performance.
Nicholas Kraemer leads Music of the Baroque in works of J.S. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, Vivaldi, Telemann and Haydn October 18 & 19. baroque.org
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