Another of my longtime dreams was coming true – the Mostly Mozart Festival! Not quite Salzburg, but pretty close – or so I thought. A Summer festival in New York City, with first rate musicians and, to top the proverbial sundae, an all Mozart opening performance with the great Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire, playing one of Mozart’s most beautiful concertos, at least as far as the second movement is concerned. I had Clara Haskil playing that Romanze in my head for weeks before the festival opening night.
And there I was, with Oboe and my mother Violetta d’Amore (no relation to Oboe d’Amore, my husband, just a coincidence in names), entering Avery Fisher Hall, with high hopes. I can however not help noticing, whenever I go to the venerable New York venue, how antiquated it has become. I might be repeating myself, but I was terribly spoiled by years of European and South American halls, the Sala São Paulo in the Brazilian metropolis, the Auditorio Nacional in Madrid, the Sala Netzahualcoyotl in Mexico, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Parco della Musica in Rome. The seating plans and the acoustics of these halls are perfectly designed and one is happy to sit anywhere. In halls like Avery Fisher or the Victoria Hall in Geneva, one either sees nothing or gets a tremendous torticollis. The acoustics, fortunately, are decent. The other side of that coin is that you do hear what is going on and last Tuesday it was less than impressive.
Visually things were not that great either. First of all, the orchestra seemed very cramped, surrounded as it was by audience on every side of the stage. Highly commendable to add seating space, but please, let the musicians have some legroom! This looked like coach-class seating on a budget airline (or, for that matter, by present standards, on any airline). I wondered how the string players were going to manage. They did, at least as far as bowing is concerned, but it was a visual mess as one couldn’t really distinguish between orchestra and audience.
Things did not improve when Langrée came in and raised his baton for the Overture to La Clemenza di Tito. Acoustic mess was added to visual. The wide spectrum of musical quality among the musicians was immediately noticeable, with the brasses and woodwinds at the bottom and the strings in the middle and nobody at the top, not even the conductor. It must be hard to conduct an orchestra in which the musicians are heterogeneous and rather uncommitted. Langrée did not succeed in infusing either quality or enthusiasm into the rendition, which was at most bureaucratic. He did need all of Tito’s Clemenza in fhe face of this fiasco.
Enter Nelson Freire and hopes rise again, only to gradually crumble. This was a tremendous letdown as Freire is definitely one of the great pianists of our days. Having heard him often, and having been completely enraptured by his Schumann, both the the concerto and solo piano pieces, and recently dazzled by his Brahms second, played in Rome with the Santa Cecilia Orchestra under the magnificent direction of Alan Gilbert (see February 19, 2011 article), I expected delicacy, control, lyricism, clarity, joyfulness, pathos – how many adjectives one can associate with Mozart’s music! And what were we served? Indifference, heavy-handedness, occasional sloppiness, impatience (justified, with such a mediocre background to play to) and a complete lack of nuance. My treasured Romanze was taken at an unforgivable let’s-get-over-with-this pace. This was not Nelson Freire, but a rather mediocre doppelgänger. Very disappointing indeed.
Luckily, all was not lost, as tenor Lawrence Brownlee came to the rescue. His is a beautiful tenor voice (I was reminded of José Carreras) and a marvelous expressiveness. Phrases were superbly delineated, something I had sorely missed in Freire’s interpretation. What a great Ferrando! So, the evening was not a total waste of time, although with the Prague we were thrown right back into Mozart for the Masses. In fact, the audience didn’t seem to have a clue to what was going on, as applause was heard after every movement and was delirious at the end. So much for Mostly Mozart, which should be renamed Anything Goes.