Spy Concert Review: All-Mozart, Start to Finish by Steve Parks

Although the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra’s all-Mozart concert series comprises only three works from his voluminous canon, the program spans all but the last three years of Mozart’s too-short life and brilliant career.

Conducted by MSO music director Michael Repper, the opening night concert at the Easton Church of God starts at the beginning, 1764, with young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Symphony No. 1, composed between the ages of 6 and 8. The next two pieces, among Mozart’s most mature works – symphonies 40 and 41 – were written in 1788 during one of the most productive periods of his prolific genius, along with a companion piece, Symphony No. 39, finished just three years before his death after completing one of his most beloved scores for the stage, “The Magic Flute” opera. That and his “Requiem,” composed in 1791, the year of his death. Apparently, it was never played for its author on his deathbed or thereafter.

Symphony No. 1 in E-flat major, reflects influences by composers known best to him as a child, his father Leopold and Johann Sebastian Bach’s son, Christian, who Wolfgang befriended as his family was in London while his dad recuperated from a lingering illness. The second movement of his first symphony features a four-note violin motif – C, D, F, E – that resurfaced in several subsequent works, including Symphony 41, better known as “Jupiter,” which concludes the concert and lends the series its title, “Mozart’s Jupiter.” The 15-minute child-prodigy Mozart’s debut opens with an at-once sonorous and lively allegro, followed by a more somber cello-and-bass led andante and an exuberant upper strings finale.

Repper then outlined the last two full symphonies credited to Mozart, though he wrote a staggering 600 compositions in all – from concertos and opera scores to sonatas and chamber quartets and quintets. Both his 40th and 41st symphonies are considered the apotheosis of his mastery of that classical form.

The 40th, aside from being one of only two symphonies he composed in a minor key (G), is among his darker complete works, opening with a somber allegro accompaniment of lower strings before the familiar first theme is introduced by woodwinds and violins, followed by a bass-heavy backbeat, led by Chris Chlumsky, in an intensifying concluding theme. The third movement, the traditional minuet, is all but undanceable though its rhythm is nevertheless refreshingly optimistic as played by woodwinds, principally clarinets (Dennis Strawley and Wendi Hatton), with horn accompaniment (Mark Hughes and Anne Nye). The finale opens with a rising strings-led arpeggio competing with clarinets driving a contrapuntal theme toward a perhaps tragic operatic ending.

After intermission, Repper warned the audience that Mozart was “showing off” in the final movement of his 41st and last symphony, “Jupiter.” He meant the remark as a compliment to the master’s unbridled skill and daring.

The simple but profound opening – some compare it to Beethoven’s Fifth – violins subtly introduce the four-note motif repeated throughout the first-movement allegro vivace, fiercely rendered with full-orchestra gusto. The second-movement andante, as defined by the term “cantabile,” is a songlike respite or shelter from the storm. The third-movement minuet, following the symphonic habit of the day, extends the contrastingly sunny disposition of his final symphony as opposed to his brooding 40th. The “Jupiter” 41st ends with a celebration of his great gift to generations of music appreciators even yet to discover him “showing off” by juggling bits of five themes borrowed from personal musical inspirations to create a greatest-hits classical “album” played in two minutes. It could leave you breathless. It seemed so for Repper, the conductor.

Think what Mozart may have accomplished with another 35 years of life. But maybe that was the presentiment that drove him – all the way to Jupiter and back.