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concert review: Symphony Silicon Valley
Dec. 11th, 2005 10:26 pmFrom the moment that the portly, Brahmsian figure of George Cleve walked out on stage, I felt transported back to the glory days when he was music director of the San Jose Symphony. This is, I think, the first time he's conducted the home-town ensemble since his 1992 retirement (prompted in part, rumor has it, by orchestra complaints over his difficult personality. But he seems to have mellowed, without detriment to his talent).
Cleve is still seen a lot leading his Mozart Festival, and this is the first installment in a 3-concert SSV mini-Mozart festival.
First, a Sinfonia Concertante for winds, KV 297b, a work with a strange history. Mozart wrote it in 1778 for performers in Paris. The score got stolen by an anti-Mozart faction before it could be performed, and only turned up a hundred years later in a manuscript copy which scholars think was modified from Mozart's original. This performance was of an attempt at reconstructing what Mozart originally wrote. The notes said that the orchestral scoring is generally believed to be authentic, though I wonder, because it sounded a bit thick and intrusive, not very light or Mozartean. But that may have been because the scoring for the concertante ensemble (flute, oboe, horn, and bassoon) was so wonderfully reminiscent of the exquisite Gran Partita, K. 361, that the orchestra seemed superfluous. (Sorry, orchestra.)
Tchaikovsky's Mozartiana Suite is actually his orchestrations of some otherwise untouched Mozart piano pieces (well, three of the movements are, and the fourth is based on genuine Mozart as well). The orchestration is pure Tchaikovsky, though there's a wind variation in the fourth movement that sounds exactly like the wind chamber music Richard Strauss was writing at the same time, and the Minuet movement has a phrase for flutes at the end of the A section that sounds uncannily like Sullivan. And yet with all this, it's still pure Mozart and it sounds like Mozart as much as it sounds like Tchaikovsky. Nicely and trippingly done.
The program finished with a performance of the Prague Symphony that it was an honor to hear. This is why Cleve gets credit as a great Mozartean. From the gigantic slow introduction on - which was moving and dramatic, not the giant doorstop it so often is - this music traveled with the grace and energy and above all the flow that makes for wonderful Mozart. At the minor-mode statement of the main theme of the slow movement came a tiny little ritard that just summed up the exquisite perfection of the thing. If the finale was a bit coarser in interpretation, one could hardly complain: it was just as fine in the playing. And to think all those weekend revelers out on First and San Salvador that one sees while leaving at 10:30 PM don't even know what they're missing.
Cleve is still seen a lot leading his Mozart Festival, and this is the first installment in a 3-concert SSV mini-Mozart festival.
First, a Sinfonia Concertante for winds, KV 297b, a work with a strange history. Mozart wrote it in 1778 for performers in Paris. The score got stolen by an anti-Mozart faction before it could be performed, and only turned up a hundred years later in a manuscript copy which scholars think was modified from Mozart's original. This performance was of an attempt at reconstructing what Mozart originally wrote. The notes said that the orchestral scoring is generally believed to be authentic, though I wonder, because it sounded a bit thick and intrusive, not very light or Mozartean. But that may have been because the scoring for the concertante ensemble (flute, oboe, horn, and bassoon) was so wonderfully reminiscent of the exquisite Gran Partita, K. 361, that the orchestra seemed superfluous. (Sorry, orchestra.)
Tchaikovsky's Mozartiana Suite is actually his orchestrations of some otherwise untouched Mozart piano pieces (well, three of the movements are, and the fourth is based on genuine Mozart as well). The orchestration is pure Tchaikovsky, though there's a wind variation in the fourth movement that sounds exactly like the wind chamber music Richard Strauss was writing at the same time, and the Minuet movement has a phrase for flutes at the end of the A section that sounds uncannily like Sullivan. And yet with all this, it's still pure Mozart and it sounds like Mozart as much as it sounds like Tchaikovsky. Nicely and trippingly done.
The program finished with a performance of the Prague Symphony that it was an honor to hear. This is why Cleve gets credit as a great Mozartean. From the gigantic slow introduction on - which was moving and dramatic, not the giant doorstop it so often is - this music traveled with the grace and energy and above all the flow that makes for wonderful Mozart. At the minor-mode statement of the main theme of the slow movement came a tiny little ritard that just summed up the exquisite perfection of the thing. If the finale was a bit coarser in interpretation, one could hardly complain: it was just as fine in the playing. And to think all those weekend revelers out on First and San Salvador that one sees while leaving at 10:30 PM don't even know what they're missing.
