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“GREAT” MASS IN C MINOR ENDS MOSTLY MOZART FESTIVAL

Robert Levine

Mostly Mozart; Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, N.Y.; August 27, 2005

The 2005 Mostly Mozart Festival came to an end Saturday night with a splendid reading of the composer’s unfinished but glorious Mass in C minor, K. 427. Lacking most of the Credo as well as the Agnus Dei and Dona nobis pacem, it certainly doesn’t seem like a torso; there is no sense, as there is in the Requiem, that Mozart had much more to say about any of the sections he did complete. Some of the orchestration was sketchy, but it was touched up satisfactorily at the turn of the 20th century, employing instrumental forces that were normally in use in Salzburg at the time Mozart wrote it.

The work is rich, with some choruses light and fugal, some weighty and double in size, some wonderfully contrapuntal and others reminiscent of Handel’s formality in his oratorios. But mixed in with all of that is virtuosic solo vocal writing for two sopranos, tenor and (sparingly used) bass. Both sopranos have difficult music – the ranges take them very low and very high (the second soprano part was taken here by a lyric mezzo) and the writing is florid. The “Et incarnatus est,” for the first soprano, is just a showpiece, with wind instruments twirling around the voice; it could just as easily be a concert aria as a piece of liturgy.

Mostly Mozart Festival conductor Louis Langrée led a vivacious, urgent reading, with utter control over his choruses (the Concert Chorale of New York and Russian Patriarchate Choir), down to the subtle piano subitos in the big Qui tollis chorus and the greater outbursts of contrapuntal complexity elsewhere. The same could be said about the orchestra, clearly well trained and rehearsed, with dynamics effectively pinpointed. Soprano Sandrine Piau, with her smallish, exquisite voice, shone among the four soloists; mezzo Tove Dahlberg was a bit wanting below the staff. Tenor Gregory Turay and bass Patrick Carfizzi rounded out the quartet.

The Mass was preceded by what should have been an equally effective event – the D minor piano concerto, K. 466, with Jonathan Biss as soloist. Mozart so rarely wrote in minor keys that what he did leave us with tends to have great impact. In Saturday’s performance it was the all-important drama that was missing. Biss’s occasional flubs in the right hand in the first movement’s rapid passages were not an issue, and one might also forgive a not-particularly tidy piano-orchestra synchronization at the start of the final movement. But the crucial variation in dynamics Mozart wrote so specifically into the piece were disregarded and therefore much of the grumbling menace in the first movement went by the wayside. Biss played the central Romance sensitively, however, and his cadenzas (Beethoven’s, but with Biss’s interjections) were exciting. Perhaps all the rehearsal time went to the Mass.

Nevertheless, the Mass ended the Festival’s successful four week run with dignity and excitement, and the sold-out house voiced their approval.

Robert Levine

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