Mozart, Schubert, and Schubert/Webern: Christian Zacharias, cond. and piano, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 8.03.2007 (BJ)

 

Ever since he began his recording career with an unusually serious choice of repertoire, notably including Schubert’s great G-major Sonata, I have held Christian Zacharias in high esteem. In 2000, like several of his fellow pianists, he added a conducting appointment to his portfolio, taking over the direction of the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra. My first encounter with that collaboration, reviewing a Mozart disc that cleverly coupled the “Prague” Symphony with its two nearest neighbors in the composer’s catalogue, was a pleasure; and this concert with the Seattle Symphony made a similar, and a similarly favorable, impression.

Zacharias tends toward the gentler, more poetic end of the pianistic spectrum, but he is capable of strong stuff too–only out of the strong, perhaps, comes forth true sweetness–and his playing in one of the grandest of all Mozart concertos, No. 22 in E-flat-major, K. 482, was exemplary in its blend of those characteristics. The outer movements had plenty of heft, the piano’s incisive passages always nicely dovetailed with excellent detail in the orchestra, and the central Andante was kept flowing without detriment to its intense pathos of expression. In his own first-movement cadenza, moreover, Zacharias showed a decidedly bold freedom from convention: he brought the orchestral winds in for two short but inventive dialogues. Such a step naturally negates the idea of the cadenza as something extemporized. But that, unless you have a soloist like Robert Levin who actually does make things up as he goes along, is perhaps only to recognize reality, and in this case it had the very considerable gain of forging an early link with the serenade-style wind passages in the succeeding Andante and Rondo–projecting those, as it were, forward in time into the opening movement.

At the other end of the program, conducting now from the podium instead of the keyboard, Zacharias offered an attractive performance of the “Linz” Symphony, No. 36 in C major. This is a work that has always seemed to me unjustly overshadowed by the four great Mozart symphonies that followed it. A local critic went so far as to say that it “isn’t one of the composer’s more remarkable symphonies,” and Donald Tovey, writing I think in the 1930s, astonishingly remarked that he had only heard it performed once. But it is a work richly endowed with wit, charm, energy, and sheer musical invention, and all of its qualities were made manifest in this performance (which observed, by the way, a decent proportion of the repeats Mozart called for).

Between the two Mozart works, Zacharias ended the first half of the program alone on stage, playing a set of German Dances for the piano by Schubert, and then began the second half by conducting Webern’s arrangement of them for small orchestra. This is strikingly romantic music. Zacharias projected the piano originals elegantly, at the same time giving full expression to the passion that so often lies just beneath the surface of Schubert’s music. The Webern orchestration offered a large role to Seattle’s splendid horn section, but it eschews trumpets, so there were none of those muted-trumpet interjections that make most of his own orchestral music sound acidic. It was revealing to hear how much his version of Schubert emphasizes the charm and sweetness of the dances–a wistful realization, perhaps, of something he knew lay only fitfully within his own creative grasp.

 

Bernard Jacobson