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Music

Mad about Mozart

In marking the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth, the classical music world plumbs the depth of his works.

By JOHN FLEMING
Published December 24, 2006

ADVERTISEMENT [Photo: Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center] Stephanie Block stars in Wicked, a sellout hit at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. A reflective Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is captured in this unfinished painting by his brother-in-law, Joseph Lange.

Mozart was the man in 2006. Sure, it has been 250 years since the wunderkind of Salzburg was born, but that was precisely the point in the classical music world's quaint convention of building entire seasons around the significant anniversaries of long dead composers.

A lot of other fields just can't compete when it comes to keeping their histories alive. This year was the 150th anniversary of the birth of another Austrian genius, Sigmund Freud, and psychoanalysis barely registers on the cultural agenda these days.

Keepers of the Mozart flame must be doing something right.

The obsession with classical music anniversaries is actually rather useful. How else are orchestras and opera companies and other arts organizations to be prodded into exploring the nooks and crannies of the vast repertoires under their stewardship?

Thankfully, the Mozart chestnuts, however wonderful they are - the "Jupiter" Symphony, the unfinished Requiem, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, et al. - that get played over and over were largely avoided in the Tampa Bay area this year. Instead, audiences were treated to such gems as the Clarinet Concerto in a delightful performance by Brian Moorhead and the Florida Orchestra.

You never know when familiarity with Mozart's less exalted works might come in handy. Trivial Pursuit, anyone?

Question: Which groundbreaking French movie features the Clarinet Concerto?

Answer: Breathless, the 1959 New Wave classic directed by Jean Luc-Godard, which has a scene in which American ingenue Jean Seberg puts on an LP of the concerto when she takes Jean-Paul Belmondo's cop-killing gangster to her apartment.

Not your usual Mozart

There were other offbeat approaches to the Mozart year that I enjoyed. Susan Haig conducted the Florida Orchestra in Tchaikovsky's homage to his favorite composer, Mozartiana, and Keith Lockhart led performances of the rarely heard Symphony No. 34. Leonidas Lipovetsky played all 18 of the Mozart piano sonatas over the course of five recitals in various locations around the area.

For sheer virtuosity, it was tough to top the all-Mozart program played by Wu Han, Ani Kavafian and other members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the centerpiece of the first and apparently last St. Petersburg Chamber Music Festival.

Sarasota Opera brought a marvelous sense of ensemble to Mozart's upstairs/downstairs comic masterpiece, The Marriage of Figaro, for which I set a personal record by having to write a correction for no less than three factual mistakes in the review. (You might be surprised at how many readers know the difference between a harpsichord and fortepiano.)

There were many Mozart books published this year - Jane Glover's Mozart's Women is especially insightful - but my constant companion, and the best single source on the composer's personality, was an older volume, the compulsively readable Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life, edited and translated by Robert Spaethling.

Finally, on the Mozart front, the Asolo Repertory Theatre, under new producing director Michael Donald Edwards, had the bright idea to open its season with Amadeus, Peter Shaffer's brilliant, if historically unreliable, play on the composer's life and times in Vienna. Bryan Torfeh gave a magnificent portrayal of Salieri, the hack court composer who schemed against his rambunctious, randy rival whose music seemed to come straight from heaven.

Happy Birthday to you, too

Incidentally, there was another important composer landmark this year, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Shostakovich, though it received a fraction of the Mozart hullabaloo. Still, Florida Orchestra music director Stefan Sanderling continued his exemplary Shostakovich cycle with the tumultuous Symphony No. 7 ("Leningrad").

Sanderling did his utmost to try to work contemporary music into the orchestra's programming, bucking the hidebound taste of an audience that can be downright hostile to anything after Brahms. Most stimulating was Mark-Anthony Turnage's Three Screaming Popes, a wild ride that the music director slyly paired with Beethoven's evergreen Third Symphony. In the crossover department, the orchestra's best pops concert of the year featured the lounge band Pink Martini.

Songs of the stage

There also was interesting musical theater on local stages in 2006. Gorilla Theatre took the honor for best production with The Last Five Years, Jason Robert Brown's song cycle about love, marriage and divorce, starring Meegan Midkiff and Tommy Foster. The Palladium Theater had an operatic triumph with Rossini's Barber of Seville, with Jon Truitt directing and singing the role of the irrepressible Figaro and Mark Sforzini conducting the Florimezzo Orchestra.

American Stage made the leap into the brave new world of park productions without Shakespeare by performing Regina Taylor's gospel musical on the penchant of African-American church women for lavish headgear, Crowns. Attendance was not great, and the hat metaphors became tiresome, but the cast was sensational, headlined by the incomparable Sharon Scott.

Gypsy Productions' staging of a musical based on the Leopold-Loeb murder case, Thrill Me, had the best backstage intrigue, with the show's composer-lyricist-playwright Stephen Dolginoff dropping out of - or being dropped from - the cast (he played Leopold) after opening night. Derek Baxter stepped in to save the day with a fine performance for the rest of the run.

And for wretched excess, you couldn't beat the road show smash Wicked, which sold out the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center in record time.

Hats off to the Chorale

The Master Chorale of Tampa Bay, under the tutelage of Rick Zielinski, continued to be responsible for some of the strongest performances in the area, such as Vaughan Williams' Sea Symphony and Schubert's E-flat Major Mass, both with the Florida Orchestra.

The orchestra brought in an outstanding group of piano soloists during the year, including Garrick Ohlsson in the infrequently performed Dvorak concerto, Stewart Goodyear in Prokofiev's jazzy fifth concerto and William Wolfram in the Stravinsky concerto.

Then there was the piano soloist par excellence, circa 1958, Van Cliburn, performing his trademark Tchaikovsky concerto in a benefit for the orchestra. Though the playing is a mere shadow of the former glory, the charisma remains.

John Fleming can be reached at (727) 893-8716 or fleming@sptimes.com

[Last modified December 21, 2006, 12:01:22]