Fortepiano Recital Sheds Light on Mozart

The typical piano recital includes something for everyone. A serious Beethoven sonata is partnered with a sentimental Chopin nocturne; Debussy’s evanescent pastels carefully foil Lisztian pyrotechnics. Preethi de Silva’s recital Sunday afternoon in the Athenaeum, however, was atypical in both programming and choice of instrument.

Confining her program to works written between 1775-1790 by two Germanic composers, Mozart and C.P.E. Bach, de Silva offered a probing, insightful foray into a musical lode mined only superficially by most contemporary piano soloists. A native of Sri Lanka, de Silva is a member of the Scripps College music faculty.

To give the authentic period flavor to her rarefied repertory, de Silva brought with her a fortepiano, a faithful modern copy of a Viennese piano made in 1796 by the builder Johann Koennicke.

Though a Viennese fortepiano looks like a Baroque harpsichord, its dry, sweet sound is made by a hammer mechanism (not from plucking) from which modern pianos have evolved. The fortepiano’s small scale and wooden frame (the lack of an iron frame prevents a high degree of tension in the strings) produces an intimate sonority that invites reflective, even introspective, playing. De Silva’s understated demeanor and the modest scale of the Athenaeum’s room were ideally matched to this end.

In Mozart’s C Minor Fantasy, K. 475, and Adagio in B Minor, K. 540, de Silva shed light on the improvisatory character of a composer who is usually presented as a paragon of perfectly proportioned structure. Mozart never thought of his works as “classical,” and de Silva ignored that customary label’s interpretive straitjacket. Her Mozart was full of nuance, flexibility and intimacy. If her supple, carefully manicured keyboard technique facilitated the obligatory passage work, it also tended to sound somewhat emotionally contained, too monochromatic. Although she exploited the instrument’s colors--especially the burnished clarity of the bass notes--her own emotional palette seemed constricted.

Placing these works along with two Mozart sonatas in the context of C.P.E. Bach’s flighty C Minor Rondo and quirky, mercurial C Major Fantasia highlighted Mozart’s stylistic dependence on a composer who is usually relegated to historical footnotes. But if the motion picture “Amadeus” celebrated Mozart as a bizarre genius, programs such as de Silva’s help underscore that Mozart was also a child of his time, one who benefited from the stylistic innovations of his colleagues.