MUSIC REVIEW : Rarely Performed Concerto Sparkles

Each year, Mainly Mozart Festival music director David Atherton dangles some long-forgotten morsel before his loyal audiences. Last year it was an overture by Chevalier St. Georges, an obscure French-West Indian contemporary of Mozart; the previous June it was the Triple Concerto by Antonio Salieri, Mozart’s admiring Viennese contemporary who was transformed into the arch-villain of the movie “Amadeus.”

Tuesday night at the Spreckels Theatre, Atherton offered Felix Mendelssohn’s rarely performed Concerto for Violin and Piano in D Minor, an ambitious work penned by the brash prodigy at age 14. His athletic double concerto bears no opus number, usually a sign that the composer deemed it part of his juvenilia. But, despite the concerto’s structural defects--it is shamelessly episodic, more like a violin sonata with aleatory orchestral interruptions--it virtually explodes with a rich profusion of musical ideas and a generous supply of heart-melting melodies.

Because the composer gave the violin all the good tunes, soloist William Preucil had a field day. Waxing alternately ardent and playful, he gave the concerto his full measure of virtuoso eloquence and sweet, limpid tone.

The unfair distribution of parts, however, left poor pianist Jon Kimura Parker with the thankless tasks of taming pages of vapid, finger-breaking passage work and demurely accompanying Preucil’s lyrical flights, challenges Parker met with bravura to spare. With perfectly matched techniques and temperaments, Preucil and Parker made an unbeatable team. Atherton and the festival strings provided crisp, neatly disciplined accompaniment throughout.

Atherton’s Mozart offerings showed contrasting sides of the composer, from the courtly manners of Six Contradances, K. 462, and the earnest counterpoint of the Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, K. 546, to the exuberance of Symphony No. 24 in B-flat, K. 182. Under Atherton’s deft baton, the Six Contradances proved uncommonly stylish, defined by subtle accents and graceful phrasing.

Atherton’s heavily articulated fugue in K. 546, however, sounded labored, although the beautifully focused opening adagio was not without its delectable dramatic moments.

Mozart’s B-flat Symphony lacked the precise orchestral ensemble that characterized most of the evening’s playing. Atherton imbued the middle movement with aristocratic elegance, but his less-than-allegro tempo of the finale made it sound needlessly stodgy.

As soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Andante Cantabile for Cello and Strings, cellist Ronald Thomas’ light touch, warm timbre and discreet variation of vibrato conjured the short work’s unaffected grace with apparent ease.

A Divertimento in E-flat for Six Winds, attributed to Mozart and labeled K. 289, completed the evening’s fare. Scholars doubt Mozart wrote the undeniably charming but somewhat simplistic piece. The six festival wind players imbued the Divertimento with infectious vitality. Notable for sympathetic and meticulously detailed phrasing were first oboe Richard Killmer and the bassoonists Steven Dibner and Gregory Barber.