Mozart Show Is Crossover Hit
For 10 years the Mainly Mozart Festival, begun in San Diego by British conductor David Atherton in 1989, has been binational. Three concerts during the two-week event are given at different venues in Baja California with Mexican sponsorship. On Thursday, the Mainly Mozart Festival Orchestra became the Sinfonica Festival Binacional de Mozart, when it appeared in the Catedral de Guadalupe in downtown Tijuana.
The cathedral, built in 1944 to replace a building destroyed by a flood of the Tijuana River, is handsome but sparsely decorated. It stands at a busy intersection amid urban decay. Cars and trucks roar by. Acoustically, it sounds like a cavern. Two blocks away is the Avenida Revolucion, where loud dance clubs attract boisterous and sometimes ugly Americans. A sign advises that “A well-behaved tourist is a welcome tourist.”
Meanwhile, the Mexican audience that filled the church on Thursday was ideal. Colorfully dressed, gracious, curious, highly sociable and sophisticated, they seemed like guests at a wedding. Socialites posed before wandering picture takers. A local television station came to get some clips for the news. There were a great many families. The concert was listened to with attention unperturbed by the stifling heat and street noise. Unlike at the typical American concert, there were no coughs, no rustling candy wrappers or noisy fiddling with the program. Cell phones did not ring. A sense of occasion was palpable.
Mainly Mozart is the best-kept Mozartean secret in America. The orchestra, whether it goes by its English or Spanish name, is a remarkable ensemble, composed of top players from notable U.S. and Canadian orchestras. The concertmaster for the first week of the festival was Martin Chalifour, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s concertmaster.
Atherton, a former music director of the San Diego Symphony, is best known as conductor of 20th century music (this spring he conducted a lavishly praised performance of Benjamin Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Metropolitan Opera), but he is also an outstanding Mozart conductor, with a crisp, clean and enthusiastically dramatic style.
As it happened, the Tijuana concert was minimally, not mainly, Mozart. The program began and ended with a “Brandenburg” Concerto by Bach. It contained two seldom-heard pieces by Michael Haydn, the younger brother of Franz Joseph Haydn and one of Mozart’s teachers in Salzburg. Mozart’s contribution was his last two “Epistle” Sonatas, brief upbeat pieces for string orchestra and organ that the young composer wrote to be inserted in the liturgical Mass. With no workable organ at the cathedral, Atherton rearranged the organ part for harpsichord, which was barely audible.
But never mind. The performances were all engaging. The soulful solo violists in Bach’s Sixth “Brandenburg” were Roland Kato from the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Joana Miranda from the Milwaukee Symphony. There wasn’t all that much that Kato and James David Christie could do given Haydn’s Double Concerto for Viola and Harpsichord personality, but they made it perfectly agreeable. Atherton did, however, turn Haydn’s short Symphony in G Major, P. 8, into a lively rocket. Bach’s “Fifth” Brandenburg was notable for its animated interplay between Chalifour and flutist Timothy Day. The fantastical harpsichord solo pretty much vaporized in the hot, still air, but Atherton maintained, throughout the evening, a sprightly energy that kept everything else alive.
Friday night, the orchestra resumed it’s English name and moved to Escondido. The change in atmosphere couldn’t have been more different. As in Tijuana, the concert was held two blocks away from a busy main street clogged with noisy old cars. These, though, were fetishistic collector’s items, part of a rally in tribute to another age, spewing pollution out of pride, not necessity.
The nearby California Center for the Arts is a modern concert hall, part of an architecturally bland, well-manicured complex that includes the City Hall and an art museum.
The audience for Friday’s concert was considerably older on average than that in Tijuana, less stylish and not demonstratively curious (the art museum offered free admission to ticket holders but, a half-hour before curtain, I saw only one other visitor at an interesting special exhibition of Los Angeles video art). Throughout the concert, there was, as in Tijuana, low-level noise, but it came from inside, not out (regular throat clearing, candy wrappers rustling, snores and the constant squeaking one restless man made with his shoes).
But again, the concert was exceptional. Escondido’s hall may be visually unimaginative, but it is an acoustic treasure, probably the best-sounding auditorium on the West Coast in which to hear an orchestra. The orchestra, larger than the ensemble in Mexico, was polished and crackerjack.
The novelty this time was the West Coast premiere of a bassoon concert that Rossini might have written. The scholars won’t commit, and it is easy to hear why. The rhythms are pure Rossini. The bassoon is buffoon, as if it were a comic bass from one of the composer’s comic operas. But missing is the sense of harmonic surprise or the melodic turns of phrases that made Rossini unpredictable. Still, it was a lot of fun witnessing Steven Dibner, from the San Francisco Symphony, puff away at it with comic flair.
The other concerto was Beethoven’s second for piano with John Lill as soloist. Lill had the advantage of solid technique and reliable musicality but not of personality. For that, Atherton was the saving grace.
And in two Mozart works--the overture to the early opera, “La Finta Giardiniera,” which is actually a small symphony, and the better-known early Symphony No. 31 (“Paris”)--the conductor was entirely in his bright, brisk element.
The first movement of the “Paris” is what I will remember the most from the concert; it burst forth from this strikingly precise and exhilarating ensemble. But nothing in this performance was a letdown, and I wonder if there will be a Mozart symphony performance to equal it at any of the ubiquitous Mozart festivals around the continent this summer.
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Mainly Mozart continues through Sunday, $16 to $45, various locations around San Diego and Tijuana, (619) 239-0100 or www.mainlymozart.org.
