Chasing Mozart and His Mass Magnificently

Two weeks ago the Los Angeles Philharmonic, playing with incendiary fire, gave the premiere of a massive, nearly hourlong magnificent symphonic work--John Adams’ “Naive and Sentimental Music”--that seemed to sum up many musical styles of the century now ending.

Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Esa-Pekka Salonen came up with another magnificent, nearly hourlong century-summing work, and played it this time with gleaming incandescence. This work is, as described by one commentator, “a summing-up that bears the stamp of the highest creative power and originality, even if this is gained at the expense of compactness and unity of style.” The words, by a German music critic, Alfred Beaujean, are lifted from Neal Zaslaw’s “The Compleat Mozart.” The work is Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, K. 427.

When writing the work in 1782, Mozart was in the throes of various obsessions. One was Bach and the high Baroque of the early 18th century, a recent discovery for him. Another was a pretty singer he planned to marry. And so the Mass in C is Bach and Handel one minute, sexy, flashy contemporary opera the next. Some of the music is contrapuntally elaborate and wondrously rich in harmony. Some of it is highly virtuosic. Some of it is engagingly direct, Mozart being aware that the Catholic Church wanted Masses less fancy and more suited to being sacred services.

We are not sure why Mozart wrote it in the first place (it was not a commission), nor why he wrote such a massive work and then didn’t finish it (the Credo breaks off after “Et incarnatus est,” the Sanctus and Benedictus have been filled in by musicologists). One theory is simply that a frenetic Mozart absorbed what he needed from Bach, got the girl, and was eager to move on to other, newer things.

But what Mozart left behind remains utterly fresh music of a great, synthesizing mind, and its concerns--making music that incorporates the past yet speaks to the present, that is both profound and earthy, spiritual and entertaining--are what every orchestra composer in America seems to be after these days.

Nor is there any other piece of this scope that takes us quite so directly into Mozart’s fertile mind. Salonen, a composer himself concerned with century-spanning in his music, proved an illuminating tour guide of the great composer’s cranium. With a combination of muscularity and acute accuracy, Salonen (not normally thought of as a supple Mozartean) conducted an exciting performance in which orchestral textures were luminously clear, in which everything sounded in sharp focus.

Responsive, too, were the singers. The Los Angeles Master Chorale was both powerful and flexible. Of the four soloists, Mozart cared only for the ladies. The soprano part is elaborate and operatic; and although Janice Chandler, who substituted for an indisposed Barbara Bonney, was cottony and overly poised early on in the Kyrie, she warmed into shining, show-stopping high notes. In contrast, Suzanne Mentzer proved to be a mezzo-soprano dramatic and attention-getting from her first utterances, and an interesting aspect of the performance was hearing these two very different voices find common, beautiful ground in the duets.

Tenor Paul Groves had little to sing; bass-baritone Nathan Berg practically nothing. But in the case of Groves, even the little he was heard resonated with special force, since it seemed to echo a spell-binding sound already etched in the ear. In the first half of the program, Groves had sung Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings with an incantory power that will not be soon forgotten. These are strange songs with texts from classic English poetry, made stranger by a weird, supernatural-sounding horn part masterfully played by the orchestra’s principal horn, Jerry Folsom.

The program, which the orchestra will perform on tour in New York next week, opened with a sprightly, fun-filled performance of Haydn’s Symphony No. 8 (“Le Soir”). Over the weeks, Salonen has been surveying early Haydn, and given undeserving short shrift for it in these pages because bigger things always followed on the programs. But let it be said, these Haydn performances have been a delight of the winter.

* The Los Angeles Philharmonic program repeats tonight at 8, $11-$65, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., (323) 850-2000.