VIRTUOSO SERIES, VIVALDI VIRTUOSI, Libby Gardner Concert Hall, University of Utah, March 25
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Josef Haydn are the two composers who have come to epitomize the classical era. Yet there were scores of other composers, many of whom not necessarily more popular than Haydn – who enjoyed immense success, especially later in life – but certainly more feted than Mozart. Mozart’s genius wasn’t fully appreciated in his day; he had to wait for later generations of musicians to understand his music.
But even among the composers of the 18th century who have been neglected after their deaths, there are a few who can be compared favorably to Mozart and Haydn. And that was what Gerald Elias and his Vivaldi Virtuosi tried to show at their concert Sunday, the final offering of the Virtuoso Series this season.
But before the concert began, Elias walked onstage and talked a bit about music in the classical era and about performance practices. He also talked about what concerts were like in the 18th century, focusing in on the fact that audiences customarily applauded between movements of multi movement works and also during a movement, and he encouraged the audience in Libby Gardner Concert Hall to do the same. It took a while, but many in the hall eventually began clapping while the music was playing – and at one point even asked for an encore performance of a movement, which Elias and his band repeated.
Two of the three composers on the program are relatively unknown today, although Domenico Cimarosa, whose overture to L’impresario in angustie (The Anguished Impresario), which opened the concert, has found a small place for himself today thanks to a popular oboe concerto. The other composer, Josef Myslivecek, who was represented with a sinfonia in D major, hasn’t been so fortunate. The two are fine composers, and both works are infused with an infectious melodicism – and both were played with polished phrases and crisp articulation by the Vivaldi Virtuosi, a group made up mostly of members of the Utah Symphony.
The remainder of the program focused on Mozart, although a young Mozart, whose music even as a teenager shows much more depth and emotional investment than one finds in his contemporaries, with the exception, of course, of Haydn.
Elias chose two fairly early works by Mozart – the Divertimento in D major, K. 251, and the Symphony No. 29 in A major, K. 201. The former of the two was played with a greatly reduced ensemble (only one player per string part); this brought out the intimacy of the work and captured its chamber music like quality.
Both pieces were given polished readings that brought out the nuances in each. The musicians in the divertimento played with elegantly crafted lyricism that emphasized the work’s lighter nature, while the symphony (for the full ensemble) was played boldly and yet with subtle inflections that captured its expressiveness as well as its scope and depth.
There was an encore, as well: Luigi Boccherini’s witty little “Night Music” from The Streets of Madrid.