Sinfonietta pits Mozart against Salieri
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The Louisiana Sinfonietta billed its Sunday concert at First Baptist Church as “When Salieri Meets Mozart.”
Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, of course, were musician peers of the late 18th century, both respected and successful. But Mozart’s star has shone through two centuries while history has designated Salieri a musical footnote.
Rumors that Salieri considered Mozart an insurmountable rival and consequently poisoned him figure in British playwright Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play “Amadeus.” The play became a 1984 movie that won eight Oscars, including a best actor statue for F. Murray Abraham’s performance as Salieri.
But there’s small evidence that Mozart and Salieri were rivals. There’s no evidence that Salieri killed him. Nonetheless, Salieri, even in Sunday’s “When Salieri Meets Mozart,” can’t catch a break. Sinfonietta leader Dinos Constantinides weighted the performance in Mozart’s favor, conducting two major Mozart pieces and only one Salieri work, his brief “La Scuola di Gelosi” overture.
Salieri didn’t have a chance. His overture shows a competent composer, skilled in orchestration but lacking much imagination in the way of melody. And it’s impossible to judge a composer who lived to be 75 years old, wrote numerous operas and taught such future stars as Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt, on a snippet of his life’s work.
Despite the short shrift given Salieri, it’s difficult to complain about too much Mozart. As usual, the composer’s music sounded marvelous during the Sinfonietta’s performance of Symphony No. 29 in A major, even though the piece was a late substitution for a Mozart violin concerto that got scrapped because of the scheduled soloist’s illness.
Following Salieri’s earthbound overture, Symphony No. 29 was characteristically brimming with melodic and harmonic invention, logic and clarity. Beyond Mozart’s composition technique, the work is, as so much of Mozart music, ascendant. Mozart’s genius contains some ever-glowing spirit that lifts it beyond the achievement of normal artists, Salieri included.
Ingenious music or not, Constantinides’ use of old but effective devices, such as dynamic contrast, shaped the music nicely. The conductor’s relatively small ensemble, too, had a light-on-its-feet yet still warm sound. The latter quality especially was evident in the second movement’s graceful melodies.
Soloist Michael Gurt, an LSU piano professor who appeared with the Baton Rouge Symphony earlier this season, joined the Sinfonietta for the afternoon’s second Mozart work, Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat major. As usual, Gurt gave a technically fine reading, executing the composer’s running lines and frequent trills with apparent ease.
As virtuosic as the Mozart concerto’s two outer movements are, the soul of the piece resides in the middle movement, marked andantino. A somber, even tragic tone anticipates the Romantic music that would follow Mozart. With that in mind, Gurt could have played the piece with even more nuance and expression and not been accused of over-romanticizing.
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