Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
Music Director Louis Langrée and the Mostly Mozart Festival
Orchestra closed their much-heralded season in triumphant fashion Saturday
night, presenting Mozart’s final three symphonies—a fitting (albeit familiar)
end to a season that had already seen the ensemble traverse some new and
interesting territory. (Interestingly enough, this was the same program Simon
Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic were presenting this weekend to open their
new season nearly 4,000 miles away from Avery Fisher Hall.)
Composed in just six weeks during the summer of 1788,
Mozart’s final testament to the symphonic form presents a varied collection of
miniatures that revel in serenity, comedy, and fleeting hints of pathos. Given
that Mozart penned another 75 works before his death in 1791, the final three
symphonies maintain a sense of youthful buoyancy, far from the somber and
autumnal feel of the Clarinet Concerto, Ave
verum corpus, and Requiem. Although often performed as three separate
entities, these symphonies, when presented together, form a virtuosic
triptych—one that Alfred Einstein himself dubbed “an appeal to eternity.”
A rarity in Mozart’s symphonic writing, Symphony No. 39
replaces the standard pair of oboes for the bourgeoning voice of the clarinet,
providing a greater sense of homogenous sound when paired with the bassoons and
horns. Clarinetists Jon Manasse and Steve Hartman were in fine form, displaying
incredible nuance throughout—especially in the trio of the Menuetto, where Manasse was able to
deliver several iterations of the simplest of eight-bar phrases without ever
repeating the same shape or color. Unfortunately, the rest of the ensemble took
some time to warm up to the occasion, which wasn’t helped by Langrée’s stodgy
tempo in the symphony’s first movement; what should have been an elegant
waltz statement became a bloated exercise in suspended animation.
Both conductor and ensemble came with guns blazing when time
for Symphony No. 40, however, presenting a delicate and restrained sense of
drama to the otherwise stormy affair. The violins were incredibly precise in
their many fleeting and nimble passages, while cellos and basses added an
underlying menace to the meditative second movement. The Menuetto and finale had character to burn, and Langrée never failed
to find the composer’s court-jester sense of humor within the minor-key
outbursts; in fact, one of the evening’s finest moments arose in the final
moments of the symphony, with the robust woodwinds and horns taking charge until
the final breathtaking release.
Whereas the first two symphonies relied on elegance and
drama, respectively, Symphony No. 41 finds Mozart at his most confident and
jubilant—by this point, a complete master of counterpoint. The orchestra was
incredibly playful in throwing around the short snippets of melody that make
the whole of the symphony, showing a precision to both their balance and rhythmic
drive that made the mad-dash five-voice fugue at the symphony’s end an example
of uncompromising clarity.