Since music director Peter Oundjian came along for the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra has hung its year-opening concerts on what a marketer would call the huge brand equity of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But the annual January festival is really about something else.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
Look at the four programmes of Mozart@257 — spread out over seven concerts, which begin this evening at 6:30 — and behold a strange assortment of genres and guest performers.
The thing is, Oundjian and his programming colleagues have created something that makes Mozart the musical conduit, not the destination. Mozart is the marketers’ main hook. But the real pleasure for anyone wise enough to snatch a ticket will be in how eloquently the composer speaks through each interpreter.
The first two concerts — Wednesday evening and Thursday afternoon — are significant in a couple of ways: They mark the official début of Canadian Opera Company music director Johannes Debus on the Toronto Symphony podium; we get a return visit from New York City-based pianist Jeremy Denk; and Canadian soprano Layla Claire gets to show off in person what she has done so impressively on the Metropolitan Opera stage.
Wendesday’s intermission-free Afterworks programme includes Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony No. 35 (K385), an aria from The Marriage of Figaro and the “Alleluja” passage from Exsultate, jubilate. Thursday’s regular-length matinée adds the Overture to Figaro as well as an aria from La finta giardiniera.
Debus is a sensitive artist who will get to show his musical stuff without being shuffled down into a pit, practically out of sight.
And Denk tends to sparkle at the piano.
The New Yorker will perform the well-loved C Major Piano Concerto No. 21 (K467) at both concerts — a work that has been part of his repertoire practically since he first started playing professionally 15 or so years ago.
I ask him if it is hard to keep a piece sounding fresh after so many years.
“It’s hard to feel unfresh when playing Mozart,” he corrects me. “I can feel unfresh playing a Franck sonata, but not Mozart.”
Denk points out that Mozart provides “a lot of room for whimsy,” in the way the music is written — sometimes in figures that are, in Denk’s words, a lot like jazz riffs. These are things the pianist likes to indulge. He even creates his own cadenzas in which, he smiles to admit, he goes on “naughty chromatic adventures” while trying to still reflect Mozart’s main musical themes.
“I want people to know that Mozart is not written in stone,” Denk declares — reflecting very much the spirit of a composer who would improvise away at the keyboard even when there was a full orchestra present.
As an opera conductor, Debus is accustomed to the sort of immediacy and flexibility that working with a stage-full of singers requires. So, with Denk’s freewheeling attitude and Claire’s charm, this programme could turn into an amusing musical ride.
You find all the details on Wednesday’s concert here, Thursday’s concert here, and an overview of the whole Mozart@257 Festival here.
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Jeremy Denk’s numerous albums, which range from Bach to Charles Ives and György Ligeti, and from solo work to collaborations, have helped spread notice of his powerful yet sensitive artistry. There is an engaging lyricism to whatever he turns his attention to.
The pianist credits the late Hungarian pianist and teacher György Sebök (1922-1999) for rocking — then changing — his world when he arrived as a fresh-faced wannabe pianist at University of Indiana in Bloomington.
Sebök’s former students tell of their teacher’s remarkable power of insight, of placing music in a larger social context, and of explaining how the language and grammar of music can be harnessed for personal rhetorical purposes.
“Not only is music a language, but every composer, I think, is a language in itself. It has its own grammar. One has to feel that, and understand that,” Sebök pointed out — in his heavily accented English. “And, still, there are dialects possible. If you speak English as they do in Boston, then that’s fine. And if you speak it as they do in London, then that’s fine, too. And if you speak it as they do in Tennessee, that’s also fine. But if you speak English as I do, then it is wrong. The pronunciation is wrong; the accent is wrong. It’s English spoken with a Hungarian accent. Playing Mozart with a Chopin accent is wrong, too.”
Denk will try to play Mozart with a Mozart accent, so expect something light and playful.
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Jeremy Denk is known for his blogging as well as his fine musicianship. His blog is called Think Denk.
I found a recent post that, for me, is a clear window into this artist’s soul. It uses a recital of Schubert sonatas by Mitsuko Uchida as a jumping off point for some powerful observations on the messiness of the human condition. And yet, in the process, comes painfully, shin-barkingly, toe-stubbingly close to describing the sonatas themselves.
As a soundtrack, I’m adding Alfred Brendel playing the first movement of the B-flat Major Sonata, D.960:
… here in Brooklyn, X and I (and X’s dog, I forgot to mention) are having language difficulties; we’re at the end of conversations we’ve had before, in verbal quandaries which keep dead-ending on voids, heavy with “umms,” impasses where the voice is squeezed by the brain’s unwillingness to go on. This is a totally classic, typical X and I moment, this breakdown of communication. Unfortunately I am only able to read the meaning of this non-communication vaguely, and it is surely informed and mistranslated by my wishful thinking, itself conflicted, which is probably crap and all of this infuriatingly, Heisenbergishly impossible to know, because if I break the silence and say do you want to be together or not, our precious vague equilibrium will be destroyed, and the question mark of our relationship will fade away into the sky like a lost balloon.
So, I respond to the breakdown by reading from a book about breakdowns. I am reading loudly; a disapproving glare radiates from the rest of the bar. Even through my pie-vodka haze I realize I am flirting via literary theory in Brooklyn, how ridiculous, I disgust myself.
You can read this passage in its proper, full, Schubertian context here.
To close with something a bit less emotionally messy, here is Denk — who last week finished recording the Goldberg Variations for future release — giving us three sections of J.S. Bach’s Keyboard Partita No. 3:
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
