Dan Williams
Guest soloist Christopher O’Riley.
A stark contrast in styles marked the Madison Symphony Orchestra’s season finale — a contrast between Mozart’s 1780s Vienna and Leoš Janáček’s 1920s Moravia.
The first half of the program, performed May 4-6 at Overture Hall, featured Mozart. The curtain-raiser was the overture to his opera Don Giovanni, a pioneering venture that anticipated some of the opera’s later music before moving on to bouncy sonata-allegro form.
Then MSO played Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat, K.527. This is the longest of the wondrous concertos that the composer wrote for his own use in his Vienna concerts, but also the one that is performed least often. It is the first in which Mozart included clarinets in the scoring (a pair in place of oboes), with distinctive results. Beyond that, he wrote important passages for the wind instruments paralleling those in his serenades and divertimenti for wind octet. Indeed, the wind bloc often becomes a conversationalist with the solo piano.
The guest soloist was Christopher O’Riley, a Chicago native who in addition to prolific playing and recording also hosts the National Public Radio show From the Top. I confess that I found some of his playing slightly self-indulgent; he took liberties with tempo. Still, he is clearly committed to this work, and plays with flair and devotion.
The second half of the program was devoted to the Glagolská mše or Glagolitic Mass, by Janáček. He was born in Moravia, one of the lands that later became part of Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). Moravia was the first Slavic land evangelized by Christians and it witnessed the birth of the Glagolitic script (predecessor of the Cyrillic writing used now for some Slavonic languages). The composer set the Church Slavonic texts in the order corresponding to the Latin Mass — but by no means as a liturgical work. It serves instead as a patriotic cultural pageant written by a fervent Slavicist.
The four vocal soloists were a mixed lot, not very Slavic in sound, though soprano Rebecca Wilson was quite impressive. As always, the diction and clarity of the large chorus suffered from its placement at the back of the stage.
Janáček included a raucous solo organ movement, which principal organist Greg Zelek revelled in. The heroes, though, were the MSO members, who played the composer’s exuberantly idiosyncratic writing to brilliant effect, as they did Janáček’s closely related Sinfonietta, a few seasons past. Maestro John DeMain deserves credit for championing these extraordinary works.
