Review – Mixing up Mozart at Southbank Centre

Always one to question received wisdom, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment decided to question Mozart’s on Monday evening. Rather than playing his Symphony No. 40 all the way through in a oner, it was split up over the course of the evening, with arias by Gluck, Haydn and Mozart interspersed.

This was inspired by the miscellany-style concerts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which would be made up of a few choice arias, a couple of overtures, and perhaps a concerto. Was this Mozart symphony suitable for such treatment? The late scholar-conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt suggested that Mozart composed his final three symphonies (which Wolfgang Amadeus wrote in a period of just six weeks, with No. 40 being the middle one) as one big work, and recorded them as such in 2014. So, perhaps not. But I’m all for experimenting.

If it was going to work, it was with this crack group of artists. Conductor Giovanni Antonini cuts a diminutive, wiry figure on the podium, but one that explodes with positive energy. And like Antonini, the Mozart was very much on its toes; light, fleet of foot, and constantly springing forward. Given each movement was being presented as a stand-alone item, the playing could have been weightier, more rooted, and allowed a little more time.

The last movement, however, was utterly thrilling, and worth the wait. The extraordinary passage at the beginning of the second section – in which Mozart destabilises the listener by giving all eleven notes of the chromatic scale but the root itself – was delivered like a series of body blows. Taut, physical playing that took no prisoners.

Nearly as exciting was the ‘Dance of the Furies’, plucked from Gluck’s Orphée et Euridice. I defy anyone to find a piece in which horns feel more at home; blaring out proudly with a glorious lack of subtlety, stubbornly blazing over hurrying fleets of strings.

Mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená was wheeled out between symphonic offerings. At first she looked a little awkward, perhaps unable to gain purchase during the first two rather fleeting solos. Then came Haydn’s Scena di Berenice, with a much greater range of expression and character to grapple with, and she made the Royal Festival Hall her own. During the second half she became ever more impressive, commanding the heights and depths of vocal lines that shone thrillingly, always comfortably at her command.

After the thrill of the final instalment of the symphony, the concert closed with ‘Parto, Parto’ from Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito, during which Antony Pay emerged as a star of the evening, nonchalantly trotting out florid passagework and arpeggios on his basset clarinet like he was peeling potatoes.

And what of the experiment? I wasn’t totally convinced, and it was as much a frustration to have Mozart’s masterpiece broken up and my satisfaction delayed as it was a delight to hear Kožená’s polished miniatures. But unlike audiences of old, I didn’t have to wait for the next concert to hear the whole shooting match straight through; I had Harnoncourt for the journey home.