Awkward strains of Mozart

Two hundred and fifty years, 27 days, nine hours and about five minutes after a composer much of the musical world worships was born in Salzburg, Austria, the Los Angeles Philharmonic added its 10 cents’ worth to the Mozart year.

Every orchestra everywhere knows it must celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. It’s good business, and the music is great. So not unexpectedly, Walt Disney Concert Hall was packed Thursday night with an audience primed to hear Christoph von Dohnanyi conduct a Mozart piano concerto and the composer’s final work, his Requiem.

The Philharmonic had meant its celebration to be more melancholy than most by dwelling on Mozart’s puzzling last year and untimely death at 35. But fate stepped in. Flu sidelined Andreas Haefliger, engaged to play Mozart’s last piano concerto. As a last-minute substitution, a 24-year-old recent Juilliard graduate, Orion Weiss, who made his Philharmonic debut at the Hollywood Bowl in September, performed the earlier Concerto No. 19 in F, K. 459.

Another young artist, soprano Celena Shafer, was the second last-minute replacement Thursday, substituting for Barbara Bonney, who also came down with the flu this week. Given that the three other soloists in the Requiem -- Ruxandra Donose, Eric Cutler and Alfred Reiter -- are emerging artists as well and that the chorus was made up of USC students, it took some doing to cast a mellow, autumnal pall over Disney. But Dohnanyi did his best.

There may be no piece of music -- and certainly no piece of great music -- more unsatisfying than Mozart’s Requiem. It is shrouded in romantic legend. A tall, gaunt, ethereal stranger shows up at the door of an impoverished composer with 50 ducats in hand and wanting a Requiem Mass. (In fact, he seems not to have been a messenger from the beyond but rather a slightly dotty count who had a habit of commissioning pieces and then pawning them off as his own.)

It is probably true that some friends gathered around Mozart’s sickbed on Dec. 4, 1791, and sang through as much of the Requiem as the composer had written, stopping on the “mournful the day” at the beginning of the Lacrimosa. Mozart, who sang the alto part, then, we are told, wept. That evening his rheumatic fever flared up, his temperature suddenly rose, and he died at 1 a.m.

What has come down to us is a completion and orchestration of Mozart’s sketches by his pupil, Franz Xaver Sussmayr. Maybe half, maybe a bit more of the score is by Mozart, and it contains some of his boldest music. But the difference between commandingly original beginning and banal end is painful. Hardly morbidly anticipating his impending death, Mozart was breaking new ground and clearly meant to finish the Mass.

Dohnanyi took a grim, majestic approach. The performance was impressive, and not even this intimidating conductor could make the bursting-with-energy Thornton Choral Artists sound anything but exuberant. The four soloists might have been a jubilant opera cast; all were exciting. The orchestra, though, was asked for thickness and weight, and details were lost.

But what a letdown when the music turns, as it does, say, in the Sanctus, unequivocally second-rate. Indeed, Dohnanyi’s seriousness and the singers’ enthusiasm only exacerbated the score’s dismaying discrepancies.

Something needs to be done. Scholars have attempted other solutions, trying hard to patch together a version that sounds more like Mozart. Robert Levin has come closest. But new Mozart Requiems are needed that stop pretending to be Mozart, versions that acknowledge what he wrote and what he did not.

The piano concerto in the first half was Mozart in a lighter vein, but it didn’t always sound so. K. 459 is boyish music, and in Weiss it had a boyish soloist. He is a pianist more lyrical than boisterous, with a small, sweet sound and an elegant sense of phrasing. He played Mozart as chamber music. Dohnanyi did not.

Sometimes, as this uncomfortable evening demonstrated, it really is best to just let Mozart be.

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Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 8 tonight

Price: $15 to $129

Contact: (323) 850-2000 or www.laphil.com