TV Review : Previn Plays Guide in ‘Mozart on Tour’

In its two hours, “Mozart on Tour” takes many potentially interesting tacks. Airing tonight at 9 on KCET Channel 28, the leisurely documentary hosted by Andre Previn is part travelogue, dramatized biography, musical survey and concert.

Its most interesting focus is on the marketing of Mozart during his own life. Taken endlessly on the road by his father, the prodigy visited most of the musical centers of Europe, and this production--a joint effort by KCET and nine European organizations--shows us them all, panoramic vistas and cozy interiors, odd little costumed re-enactments and modern street scenes.

The new-old juxtapositions seem to have contradictory intentions, trying to show both how different travel and musical life were in Mozart’s day and that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Previn uses the phrase “then, as now” in several of his descriptions, including the provocative observation that musical careers in Vienna depend on chicanery and connections as much as talent.

This tour follows Mozart’s life chronologically as well as geographically, with strange lapses. The composer’s marriage--a tumultuous event in his life, personally and professionally--is barely noted in retrospect, while less significant occasions loom large, simply because travel is involved.

Previn, long a sympathetic Mozartean, makes an urbane, low-key host. He gives some intriguing hints about how the young musician developed through his journeys, but these glimpses into matters of musical substance remain incomplete and subordinate to logging all the mileage.

So too are the performances involved, until the finale. Unidentified luminaries such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Mitsuko Uchida, Radu Lupu, Helmut Rilling and the Talich String Quartet appear in excerpts. The most striking aspect to all the snippets is that they feature modern instruments; the show attaches great importance to showing us authentic or recreated 18th-Century scenes but not sounds.

At the end is a complete performance of Mozart’s last Piano Concerto, K. 595 in B-flat, with 22-year old Aleksandar Madzar the lyrical, articulate soloist.

Previn leads the accompanying Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the Schonbrunn Palace--another period site matched with very modern sounds. The musical performance is quite respectable on its own terms, but the camera work proves distracting, with long close-ups on Madzar’s soulfully uplifted face, eyes closed and lips twitching in apparent poetic rapture.