By Eileen Wingard in La Jolla, California
The Mainly Mozart Festival forged ahead with two delightful concerts at the Conrad, June 23 and 25, prior to their final program at the Epstein Family Amphitheater on June 27.
On Tuesday, June 23, pianist Anton Nel delivered a spirited performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9, considered the composer’s first mature concerto masterpiece. It was written when Mozart was 21 and is often called the Jenamy Concerto because it was inspired by a talented French pianist named Victoire Jenamy.
Nel imbued the first movement with energetic sparkle, the first movement beginning with immediate interventions of the piano in a continuing dialogue. He phrased the lyrical passages with graceful nuances.
The South African pianist was born and educated in Johannesburg before coming to the United States at the age of 21 to study at the University of Cincinnati, where he pursued his master’s and doctoral degrees. In 2000, Nel was appointed Professor of Piano and Chamber music at the University of Texas at Austin, where he heads the Division of Keyboard Studies. Nel was winner of the first prize in the 1987 Naumburg International Piano Competition at Carnegie Hall.
The second movement of the concerto was unusual, being in a minor key and expressing sadness, perhaps a reflection of the recent death in Paris of Mozart’s mother.
The last movement brimmed with joyful playfulness that Nel’s expert technique made look like child’s play each time the rondo theme returned. Inserted in that rapid movement was a minuet, before cascading to the upbeat ending.
Nel was not only the soloist for the evening, but he played and curated the Prelude chamber music for the entire festival and for this concert, also played harpsichord in the opening piece, Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, music written for Louis XIV to accompany Moliere’s comedy about a bourgeois man aspiring to become an aristocrat. In addition, Nel played piano during Richard Strauss’s music by the same name, a nine-movement suite of programmatic episodes inspired by the Moliere play.
Lully’s 1670 work was conducted with humorous theatrics. For the final movement, conductor Francis took a large spear and pounded it on his podium in lieu of a baton. Percussionist Wesley Sumpter (principal, Los Angeles Philharmonic), danced his way up to the conductor, tooting a toy trumpet, with the final toot in time to the last chord of the piece.
Strauss’ Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, much expanded from Lully’s version, utilized the string principals in solo passages. Memorable were solos played by the newly appointed concertmaster for the Mainly Mozart Orchestra, David Kim (concertmaster, Philadelphia Orchestra), Brant Bayless (violist, principal, Utah Symphony), and Robert DeMaine (principal, Los Angeles Philharmonic).
Two days later, another concert featured a Mozart heavy-weight, Symphony #41, the Jupiter Symphony. Conductor Francis reminded the audience that the last time the Mainly Mozart orchestra performed the Jupiter Symphony, they were listening to the music in their autos in a parking lot during the Covid epidemic. Mainly Mozart made national news for being the first orchestra to find a way of performing for live audiences during that trying period.
Listening to the four-movement work in the wonderful acoustics of the Baker-Baum Concert Hall was a real treat.
The contrasting piano and forte dynamics were well articulated.
The first movement, Allegro vivace, alternated with themes of military vigor and passages of tender delicacy. The second movement, Andante Cantabile, sang forth with many solos beautifully played by oboist Erin Hannigan (principal, Dallas Symphony). The third movement, Menuetto, had a stately minuet theme bookending a middle section Laendler-like peasant dance. The final movement, Molto Allegro, culminated with a five-part double fugue. What a thrilling conclusion to the last concert of the season in the Conrad.
The concert opened with the mesmerizing Cantus in Memoriam of Benjamin Britten by the Estonian composer, Arvo Part. It began with the sound of a single chime and a soft, slow descension of the strings within the natural A minor scale which grew in momentum and volume, ending in a soft tap of the chime. The seven-minute piece was scored for strings and chime.
The main offering of the first half of the program featured Canadian violinist, James Ehnes, in a performance of Robert Schumann’s Violin Concerto in D minor. This concerto has an interesting history. It was composed the year before Schumann’s suicide attempt and was the last major work he composed before his death in an asylum in 1856.
His friend, the Jewish-born violinist, Joseph Joachim, to whom the piece was dedicated and who owned the manuscript, determined that it should not be published until 100 years after Schumann’s death. When the great violinist, Yehudi Menuhin, saw the manuscript in 1937, he wrote to his friend, Vladimir Golschmann, conductor of the St. Louis Symphony, that he thought this concerto was the missing link between the concertos of Beethoven and Brahms. Menuhin performed it with Golschmann and the St. Louis Symphony.
Although the concerto is not as virtuosic as other violin concertos, having no cadenzas and does not take as much advantage of the violin’s upper register, scoring much of it in the lower strings, in Ehnes’ hands, it proved to be an engaging work with beautiful melodic passages, especially in the second movement. The last movement was in the form of a majestic polonaise.
In case there was any doubt about the virtuosic capabilities of this artist, it was soon dispelled when he launched into Eugene Ysaye’s Sonata #3 as an encore. This one-movement sonata for unaccompanied violin served to display the violinist’s great technical prowess. Once again, the audience stood in admiration.
Thanks to successful fundraising, Mainly Mozart ends the season with financial capability to expand its work. It also extended the contract of pianist Anton Nel as curator of its Prelude series. He is certainly one of their richest assets.
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Eileen Wingard, a retired violinist with the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, is a freelance writer specializing in coverage of the arts.