Lighting Up a Gloomy Day - Mozart in Carnegie Hall with St. Luke's

Today was one of those dismal days we occasionally get in New York City in the winter.  Gloomy, overcast skies, chilly, dripping rain mixed with occasional snowflakes...  Grim all around.  So I was glad I had a ticket to attend the all-Mozart concert offered by the Orchestra of St. Luke's at Carnegie Hall. And that they chose major-key Mozart - no doom and gloom there.  Roberto Abbado was the guest conductor for the occasion, and Andreas Heafliger the piano soloist.  The program began and ended with symphonies -- Nos. 35 and 41 -- with the 15th Piano Concerto before the intermission. 

St. Luke's is a virtuosic bunch, but I thought just a little underpowered in the upper string sections for Symphony No. 35, known as the Haffner symphony because it was concocted by Mozart out of a serenade he had written for a Haffner family event.  Those fast scalar passages sounded rather thin at times, easily drowned out by the wind chords accompanying them, at least from my perspective in the front of the balcony.  Abbado (nephew of the more well-known Claudio Abbado) is a "fast" conductor in Mozart, so there was plenty of energy in the outer movements, but I thought too much energy in the Andante.  The entire symphony is a bit short by the standards of Mozart's maturity, and playing the andante briskly makes it even shorter, but makes that lovely movement seem a bit superficial and breathless.  Or so it seemed to me on this occasion.

Haefliger sounded like a pianist who takes seriously Mozart's injunction that his allegro movements should "flow like oil."  Everything was presented very smoothly, rippling scales and arpeggios and the like.  I found it a little bland, perhaps, and more restrained in dynamic range than I would have preferred.  The 15th Concerto (K. 450, in Bb Major) has lots of show-off stuff, and a pleasant theme-and-variations middle movement.  The tempi were more to my liking than in the opening symphony, but I did not find the performance completely successful.  Nothing to fault technically from pianist and orchestra, but I found the performance short on drama.

After the intermission, however, things were quite different.  Abbado took lots of repeats, which turns this final numbered Mozart Symphony No. 41 into a big affair, comparable in length to Beethoven's first two symphonies, and having a breadth of utterance putting it in that league as well.  Certainly, it is in many ways closer to the romantic ideal of the symphony that was to emerge early in the 19th century than the series of symphonies that Haydn wrote after Mozart had died.  Abbado led a powerful performance.  Although there were no more strings than I saw in the first half (10-8-6-5-3), somehow the sound of the violins was bigger, the accents sharper, the dynamic range wider -- the first movement was even stormy at times, and drama was served.  The entire symphony got a great work-out, not least due to the forceful timpani-playing of Maya Gunji (who was great fun to watch) and the excellent, assertive trumpets and horns.  Despite the chamber-size string ensemble, this sounded like good old big-band Mozart that would have been heard from a major symphony orchestra before they started to misguidedly cut down to chamber size for this composer.  (I say misguidedly because by all reports Mozart was always asking for more strings, and was delighted whenever he could have an expanded string section for an orchestral performance.  I think he would have been delighted by the NY Philharmonic string section at full strength, and would have found it appropriate for all the symphonies he wrote after moving to Vienna from Salzburg.)

So, the concert ended in a blaze of glory and fired up our spirits before venturing out into the late afternoon rainy gloom ...