2008 Festival Review
Music review: Brahms shakes up Mozart festival
by Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic
July 26, 2008
For more than 30 years, George Cleve and the Midsummer Mozart Festival have made it a point of pride to present all Mozart, all the time. But they're not above slipping the occasional ringer in through a side door.
The guest of honor during Thursday's elegant and enjoyable concert at the Mission Santa Clara was, of all people, Johannes Brahms. The Romantic master put in a brief but attention-grabbing appearance during Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor, K. 491, thanks to the efforts of soloist Nikolai Demidenko, and offered a handy reminder of the virtues of a little variety.
It turns out that Brahms, not content with writing his own two towering piano concertos, also left cadenzas for a handful of concertos by his predecessors, including Mozart's C-Minor. They're rarely done - what would be the occasion? - but this one, at least, is a little masterpiece of passive-aggressive overshadowing.
It begins in more or less traditional form, with a riff on the concerto's main themes done with Brahms' distinctive arsenal of rippling keyboard accompaniments and parallel sixths. But soon it expands and balloons, and within scarcely a minute Brahms is commanding the stage, having elbowed poor old Mozart into the wings.
Demidenko, a pianist equally at home in the Classical and Romantic repertoire, straddled both sides of this display beautifully. He delivered the opening strains of the cadenza with delicate grace, then gave the conclusion a full helping of triumphalism.
And that was only the highlight of a generally persuasive rendition, one that mixed communicative tenderness with dark dramatic power. Even before Brahms came on the scene, the first movement sounded muscular and arresting, with Demidenko and Cleve sharing an aptly tempestuous view of the music.
The elegantly balanced phrases of the slow movement kept their limpid clarity, even as the performers rounded the edges off just enough to avoid a sense of sterility. And if the final Allegretto went by at a peculiarly slow tempo, there was enough detail to make the choice seem apt.
In its 34th season, the festival is pursuing some new directions - next week's concluding offering is a semistaged performance of "The Abduction From the Seraglio," the first operatic undertaking in its history. But in the meantime, the orchestral programming is in a traditional vein.
The evening's first half was devoted to a robust and shapely account of the "Gran Partita," K. 361, the voluminous serenade for six pairs of wind instruments with double bass. It's a tricky instrumental combination for the reverberant acoustics of the Mission, but Cleve succeeded in thinning out the textures enough to let Mozart's melodic invention shine through. Principal oboist Laura Griffiths, serving as a sort of woodwind concertmaster, provided an eloquent solo turn in the third movement.
The program repeats ...
E-mail Joshua Kosman at jkosman@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
