A Mozart Celebration From Glenn Gould

Is it safe to go back into the Mozart? You might well ask after the excesses of the 1991 celebratory year, with its ludicrous overkill in live performance, in seminars, book publishing and by the recording industry, which had never exactly ignored Salzburg’s most commercialized son.

The ensuing two years have, not unexpectedly, seen a dropping-off of Mozartean activity, to what might be called safe levels. And, happily, one can discern a heightened post-’91 awareness among musicians of the performance practices that best suit the composer.

Among the recorded reissues, one that might have been lost amid glitzier components of another, more recent deluge--the collected recordings of the brilliant, far too short-lived Canadian pianist- provocateur , Glenn Gould--is his only commercial recording of a Mozart concerto, the darkly dramatic work in C minor, K. 491 (Sony 52626, mid-price). And it’s a stunner: probingly intense, powerfully propelled in the outer movements, with just the right balance between Romantic introspection and Classical momentum in the slow movement, all with the sensitively attuned collaboration of conductor Walter Susskind and his CBC Symphony of Toronto.

It’s tempting to call the interpretation, recorded in 1961, historically informed, particularly as regards the filling-in of what Mozart only suggested, in the left hand and at cadential climaxes, and the enhancing rubatos in the slow movement. But the more likely truth is that here, as in nearly everything Gould played, he was being not so much true to history as to himself. Which, in this glorious instance, should be good enough for anyone.

The remainder of this generously filled CD is devoted to Gould entirely on his own, a more dangerous proposition, but hardly at his most willful, in Mozart’s familiar Sonata in C, K. 330, and the tremendous, infrequently encountered Fantasia and Fugue, K. 394, as well as Haydn’s big, latter-years Sonata in E-flat, No. 49.

One of Mozart’s richest--and longest--orchestral creations is the so-called “Posthorn” Serenade, K. 320 (after the solo for that antique instrument in the penultimate movement), a score that alternates blazing energy with courtly elegance.

The 40-minute-long Serenade has never had it better than in the 1969 recording by the Cleveland Orchestra at its most virtuosic under an uncharacteristically unbuttoned and flexible George Szell.

Its reappearance on one of Sony’s preposterously inexpensive “‘Essential Classics” CDs (48266) is a major Mozartean event. And while it alone would have been worth the paltry asking price, the “Posthorn” is in fact part of a Mozart program that also includes “Eine kleine you-know-what,” from Szell/Cleveland, and, more pertinently, some charming German Dances in which Erich Leinsdorf leads the London Symphony.

Like Gould’s take on the C-minor Concerto, the Szell-led “Post-horn” is stylish not because he read a book on interpretation, but rather because he was, when he allowed himself to be, a musician of rare and penetrating insight.

Among recently recorded material, one standout pairs period performances of two splendid works for voices and orchestra: the “Coronation” Mass, K. 317, and the “Vesperae solennes de Confessore,” K. 339, each with its ecstatic soprano solo sung with simplicity and purity of tone by Emma Kirkby (L’Oiseau-Lyre 436 585).

The excellent Winchester Cathedral Choir and the Academy of Ancient Music are conducted by Christopher Hogwood, whose lively, flowing work here is a far cry from his manhandling of the Mozart symphonies some years back, in the days when period performance too often meant going off half-informed historically and half-prepared musically.

There is nothing exotic about these presentations. Aside from the sound of the old instruments, what is heard here might have been considered adjacent to the mainstream of a couple of decades ago. The mainstream of intelligent performance, that is, predicated on at least a gut feeling for the different interpretive requirements of different historical eras.