Bigger Than Mozart, Yet Wonderfully Neat And Elegant

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday February 28, 2007

Reviewed by Graeme Skinner

*CLASSICAL

AUSTRALIAN BRANDENBURG

ORCHESTRA

with Kristian Bezuidenhout, fortepiano

City Recital Hall, February 23

THE Brandenburg Orchestra's new Mozart fortepiano proved to be a captivating addition to its instruments in Friday's concert.

A replica of the Walter instrument Mozart acquired in the early 1780s (now in the Salzburg Mozarthaus), it is such a delicate piece of furniture that it was almost an act of sacrilege when soloist Kristian Bezuidenhout (not as compact a man physically as Mozart) lowered himself onto its petite matching french-polished stool.

What issued from under his fists, however, was as far removed from violence as can be imagined, and his reading of Mozart's C-major concerto (K467) was the occasion for some of the neatest piano playing yet heard in 17 years of Brandenburg concerts. Elegant it might have been, but it was also, for a medium-sized concert hall, perilously sotto voce, especially for modern ears attuned to the detail of digital recording.

Probably partly as a result of the familiarity of the material, the Mozart concerto seemed not to suffer from the extra attentive listening required. However, the instrument's occasional lack of presence against its orchestral backdrop led to moments of drop-out in the less well-known Mozart A-major Rondo (K414). What can, should, or might be done about this problem is as much a matter of taste as practicality, but I wonder whether in the future some discreet amplification might not be considered.

Paul Dyer brought some welcome leavening to this "classic Mozart" program with two short fillers by Simone Mayr (Donizetti's teacher) and Joseph Schuster. The overture to Mayr's Sisara (a 1793 oratorio for one of Venice's orphanages) sounded, if anything, streets ahead of Mozart and Vienna, and not a whole lot less interesting, intrinsically, than Haydn's Eighty-Second Symphony, one of the Paris set (called, inexplicably, The Bear), the other major work on the program. The parts of the largish wind section succumbed to moments of confusion in the Haydn on Friday night (compared with the near perfection of their Mozart playing), but one imagines these teething problems will have righted themselves before the program is repeated tonight, Friday and Saturday at 7pm and Saturday at 2pm.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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