Piano Concerto to Join Chorale Concert for Extra Dab of Color

Music director William Hall makes no apologies for his unorthodox decision to include a piano concerto in a choral concert this weekend.

“I don’t really think of a choral concert as strictly choral music,” he said in a recent interview. “I think you have to be very careful: 2 1/2 hours can be relatively dull unless you have innovative programming and you temper the sound so that there are many different colors.”

Hall will direct Mozart’s Concerto No. 21 (which has come to be known as the Elvira Madigan Concerto because of its use in that movie) on the Master Chorale of Orange County’s season-opening concert Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. The all-Mozart program also will include the Missa Brevis in D and the C-minor Mass, “The Great.”

Hall said that, in addition to its use in the movie, the Concerto No. 21 “probably has sold more goods on the boob tube than any other piece of classical music.

“But it is one of a number of (Mozart’s) great concertos. It is one of the most popular because it is so beautiful and beautifully put together.”

Soloist Clive Swansbourne will play his own cadenzas. “Not just the two major cadenzas (in the outer movements),” Hall said, “but where there are fermatas, where you usually pause with just a little trill and then go on, he’s written out two or three bars, which were a shock to me, but which is wonderful music-making. . . . He is following Mozart’s suggestion that something here should be added.”

In designing the program, Hall chose works representing different periods of the composer’s life.

“I wanted to start young and show (Mozart’s early) influences,” Hall said. “There is some Handel in the Missa Brevis (in D), and a little of Haydn. The Missa Brevis is an afternoon work, a church service work that he wrote for Salzburg. But it’s not just a church piece. It’s drawing-room music with a liturgical text. . . . You hear just glimpses of what you hear in the (later) piano concerto and in the Mass--one or two bars.”

The work is curious for leaving out violas. “At that time, violas were not allowed in the church,” Hall explained. “The viola was called a devil’s instrument. That didn’t last very long, but while in Salzburg, Mozart literally couldn’t write anything for the viola.”

The C-minor Mass represents “a very mature period, and yet almost a childlike retrospection as (Mozart) looks back to some of his earlier works,” Hall continued.

The work, which Mozart left unfinished, dates from a period when Mozart was discovering the music of Handel and Bach at Sunday musicales given by the Baron Gottfried van Swieten.

“Literally, you hear Bach, Handel and Haydn, more pressed together, as only Mozart can do, being an eclectic composer, which makes the music even much greater,” the conductor said.

Hall hopes to create a different sound from the 95-member chorale for each of the two works.

“We’ll be trying to achieve a totally different aural effect (in the C-minor Mass) from the Missa Brevis so that the audience does hear in a sense, if you want to call it ‘slimmer Mozart,’ ” he said. “The lighter sound is approached through sotto voce. The vowel color is exactly the same. It’s just a lighter quality.”

Hall also will experiment with the seating of the orchestra.

“The first and second violins will be divided equally across the stage, cellos stage right and basses stage left, but within hearing distance of each other,” he said. “I wanted to try to find if the inner parts could be heard better, more clearly.”

William Hall will conduct the Master Chorale of Orange County in a Mozart program Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. Works will include the Missa Brevis in D, the Mass in C minor and the Piano Concerto No. 21, with soloist Clive Swansbourne. Tickets: $11-$32.50. Information: (714) 740-2000.