Resurrecting Mozart’s Musical Spirit

With the emphasis nowadays on period-performance Mozart or sleek, small-orchestra Mozart on modern instruments, the sensibilities are easily rattled by an encounter with the composer the way he used to sound.

An extreme example of Mozart past is found in a CD reissue of the “Jupiter” Symphony recorded by Sir Thomas Beecham and his Royal Philharmonic shortly before the venerated conductor’s death in 1960 (EMI/Angel Studio 69811).

What once (we are told, and may even dimly recall) sounded bright, energetic and stylish is bloated, coarse and ponderous today--all the more so for Beecham’s insistence on improving Mozart’s finale by inserting an alien trombone part, an expanded timpani part and, ultimately, the most egregious ritardando not of the composer’s invention in the history of recorded music.

The companion piece, Beethoven’s Second Symphony, responds well to the burly energy of Beecham & Co. and is presented in a form the composer might readily have recognized.

Whereas Beecham is stingy with “Jupiter” repeats, Riccardo Muti, who leads the Berlin Philharmonic (on EMI/Angel 47465), is generous indeed. Which is the extent of his involvement with Classical style in this thickly textured, spasmodic reading.

As fillup, Muti and the far too numerous BPO strings inflate the little Divertimento in D, K. 136, with heavy attacks and gratuitous repeats.

The Symphony No. 29 in A, K. 201, with its airborne melodies and delicate scoring, is an impressive vehicle for the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra under its music director, the ubiquitous Iona Brown (Omega 1004).

Listeners familiar with Brown’s work will find here the same expert string balances and buoyancy that mark the playing of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Brown’s program is, however, unlikely to win awards for originality. The prospect of yet another string divertimento (both K. 136 and K. 138 are included) and “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” does not make the pulse race.

Period specialist John Eliot Gardiner and his English Baroque Soloists orchestra have lately added to their substantial discography trim, peppery traversals of the “Paris” Symphony, K. 297, with its two different minuets, and the glorious C-major Symphony, K. 334, with the minuet (K. 409) presumed to have been intended for what Mozart ultimately left a three-movement work (Philips 420 937).

Gardiner and his orchestra also continue their now nearly complete recorded series of the Mozart piano concertos with the ever insightful, erudite and, most important, lively Malcolm Bilson at the keyboard.

The latest installment (Deutsche Grammophon Archiv 423 595) offers the intimate Concerto in A, K. 488, and the grand, endlessly surprising Concerto in E-flat, K. 482. In the latter, in spite of a performance that could hardly be bettered, one begins to sense that the light-toned 18th-Century piano is losing its struggle for primacy in the face of the composer’s ever-increasing demands for orchestral sonority.

The modern piano has no problems, of course, competing for sonic dominance with a modern orchestra--again, Brown and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, performing with silken polish. But Swiss pianist Brigitte Meyer proves a dulcet-toned, miniaturizing cipher in K. 488 and in the deep, dark Concerto in E-flat, K. 271 (Omega 1003).

There is no shortage of personality in Mozart’s four Horn Concertos, with additional fragments, as presented by Lowell Greer, principal hornist of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, which joins him here under the jovially energetic direction of Nicholas McGegan (Harmonia Mundi 907012).

Greer obtains a variety of tone and color from his valveless blunderbuss that might be the envy of many performers on the modern French horn. One feels not so much the arduousness of his task as his pleasure in conquering its exigencies.