Most Symphoria concerts are planned to provide stylistic contrast between the composers represented. This evening’s concert promises the same kind of contrast, but within the works of a single composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791). Mozart, of course, lived a short life—but the range of his style was nearly as great as the depth of his imagination.

The Symphony No. 29 (K. 201/186a, 1774), in the sunlit key of A Major, may be the work of a teenager, but it’s a remarkably sophisticated work—and its sheer confidence may explain why it has become the most popular ...

Most Symphoria concerts are planned to provide stylistic contrast between the composers represented. This evening’s concert promises the same kind of contrast, but within the works of a single composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791). Mozart, of course, lived a short life—but the range of his style was nearly as great as the depth of his imagination.

The Symphony No. 29 (K. 201/186a, 1774), in the sunlit key of A Major, may be the work of a teenager, but it’s a remarkably sophisticated work—and its sheer confidence may explain why it has become the most popular of Mozart’s early symphonies. Written in the wake of a trip to Vienna, where he got a strong jolt of new music, it shows the young composer fusing that exhilarating experience with his earlier influences to produce something original. Original—and arresting: the opening themes of both the first and last movements include striking octave leaps, and one can imagine the young composer flexing his muscles and challenging his imagination. He challenged his players, too. “It’s tremendously difficult for the orchestra,” says conductor Larry Loh, “with really high parts for the horns. There’s something about the sound of the high horn that gives it an exciting, on-the-edge feeling.”

If the Symphony No. 29 shows the young composer at his brightest, the Requiem shows Mozart at his darkest. Even the instrumentation is dark, with the elimination of flutes and horns, and the inclusion of basset horns (a darker cousin of the clarinet), which, in Larry’s words, “adds great color and depth to the winds.” It is also reveals Mozart at his most serious and at his most dramatic, with elaborate Bach-inspired counterpoint and overwhelming choruses.

Mozart died before he could complete it. In fact, at tonight’s performance, Larry will take a brief pause after the last measure that Mozart composed, the eighth measure of the Lacrimosa—what Larry calls “one of the most poignant and expressive things he ever wrote.” Just as Tchaikovsky’s gloomy Sixth Symphony (performed last November) took on a rich mythology because he composed it right before his unexpected death, so the concurrence of Mozart’s unfinished Requiem and his own early death has encouraged all sorts of rumors about ghostly portents —and even conspiracy theories (going back two centuries, but most elaborately set out in the play and film Amadeus) that he was poisoned.

Granted, there is a strange story behind the work, but it centers more on plagiarism than on poison. In July 1791, Mozart was approached by a go-between for an anonymous donor who wanted to commission a Requiem. That donor was Count Franz von Walsegg, a wealthy amateur who had the habit of commissioning works from professional composers and passing them off as his own. In any case, Mozart was initially motivated to accept the job by the perennial need for cash rather than by any premonition of his death. In fact, while the Requiem project sat unfulfilled, Mozart, an inveterate multitasker, was also working on a number of other pieces, including the radiant Clarinet Concerto. If Mozart ever really felt that this was his own Requiem (as some sources have claimed), it was only toward the very end of his life, months after the piece had been commissioned.

Still, whatever the misleading mythology, Mozart’s death did bring up real editorial problems, first for his wife Constanze, then for modern performers. With the financial standing of his family more desperate than ever, Constanze had to find someone to finish the work. Eventually she settled on Mozart’s student and copyist, Franz Xaver Süssmayr (1766-1803). Had Mozart shared ideas about the unfinished portions of the Requiem with Süssmayr? We may never know, but in any case, Süssmayr rose to the occasion (surely, the only music by him in the repertoire is his contribution to this work). The sections he composed fit in well, and he had the judgment to end the piece by bringing back music from the beginning of the work, thus rounding out the Requiem with authentic Mozart. Over the years, many others have tried their hand at more “scholarly” reconstructions, but for most listeners, the Süssmayr edition is “the” Mozart Requiem, and that’s the one we’ll be hearing tonight.

What kind of performance can we expect? Larry thinks of himself primarily as an instrumentalist rather than a singer. Still, he first performed this piece as a highschooler, singing in a chorus during the summer (at a time when he was too young to appreciate its depth); and his first degree was in choral conducting. This background in choral music has affected the way he conducts. “I have always approached every instrument in the way the human voice would, so it seems like something that is speaking, in a literal way. You need breath, you need accent, you need emphasis and context in the line to bring out some syllable or a word.” That’s true in orchestral music; it’s even truer in works for chorus and orchestra; and it’s especially true here, where Mozart has been so careful with his setting of the text. “I think of the orchestra as conveying the words the same way the chorus does. If we’re all thinking the same way, I hope that the words come alive with the orchestra in the same way that they do with the chorus.”

One of Mozart’s works overlapping with the Requiem project was The Magic Flute. In part because it reflects Mozart’s interest in Masonry, this work certainly has its serious side; but it’s also beloved for its slapstick, its fantasy, and its true-love-conquers-all romance—not to mention its vocal fireworks and its orchestral brilliance. Both the light and dark sides emerge in the overture, which makes it an especially fitting opener to our concert.

Peter J. Rabinowitz
prabinowitz@ExperienceSymphoria.com