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
