This is one of those recordings you want to like because the band plays with evident dedication–but you just can’t, and it’s all the conductor’s fault. Personally, I’ve had my fill of period-performance “experts” who affect scholarly credentials as a justification for the kind of mannerisms and amateurishness that nasty Romantic conductors like Furtwängler or Walter never would have permitted in Mozart. Take the opening movements of the Haffner and Jupiter Symphonies. What possible justification can there be for the tiny hesitations that Jeanette Sorrell inflicts on their openings, the “breath pauses” that continually stop the music’s onward flow? Why is the introduction to the Don Giovanni Overture so consistently loud? Why does the hiss of escaping air from the flutes hover like musical smog over the rest of the orchestra? In what treatise of Mozart’s day will you find a scholar who says that “piano” means “play everything mezzo forte or above”?
Similarly, I can’t believe that Mozart tells his violins to make such heavy weather out of the graceful and light-hearted andante of the Haffner Symphony. Sorrell sets a nice, swinging tempo for the minuet, but then here come those annoying hesitations at the close of just about every section. She also plays the finale of the Jupiter like an explorer hacking her way through a thicket with a machete. It’s just crude, with a desperate lack of both a sense of the long line and the necessary dynamic nuance. Finally, why is it that when we know perfectly well that Mozart wanted as many basses as possible, Sorrell uses only two? Together with booming timpani the result is a muddy bottom seriously wanting definition (less-than-enthusiastic trumpets don’t help either, especially at the conclusion of the Jupiter Symphony where they really should ring out). To sum up: period, shmeriod. This is plodding, uninspired music making.
