SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

The Mostly Mozart Festival 2008's  Final Concert : Cyndia Sieden (soprano), Renata Pokupić (mezzo), Mark Wilde (tenor), Andrew Foster-Williams (bass-baritone). Academy of St. Martin in the Fields; Mostly Mozart Festival Chorus, Carlo Rizzi (conductor) Barbican Hall London 2. 8.2008 (MMB)

Mozart : – The Impresario Overture (1786); Arias: Vorrei spiegarvi, o Dio! (1783), Nehmt meinen Dank, ihr holden Gönner (1782), Popoli di Tessaglia!...Io non chiedo (1778); The Magic Flute (1791) Der Hölle Rache; Requiem (1791) as completed by Süssmayr.


This was the last concert of the 2008 Mostly Mozart Festival, which takes place every summer at the Barbican and is supported by Classic FM. While the Festival is predominantly about Mozart and his music it always includes works by other composers -  this year there have been compositions by Beethoven, Dvořák, Handel, Haydn, Mendelssohn and Shostakovich. The Festival also continues  outside of the normal concert programme: one can enjoy an hour of free music performed live in the foyer of the Barbican before the evening concert and there are talks and debates, as well as free post-concert fireworks on the first and last nights by the Barbican lakeside. The Festival is a very popular event and always well attended, for which the main reason is of course the undying, enduring appeal of Mozart’s music, captured perfecyly in one sentence by Classic FM’s presenter, Simon Bates, explaining why he listens to Mozart: “I listen to Mozart when I’m delighted or depressed and at all the points in between”.

The programme of this final concert included Mozart’s Requiem, which suitably filled the second half  so was the final piece performed in the festival. The concert was sold out and it was  interesting to note that the audience was a colourful collective  from all walks of life and with ages ranging from the very young – across the aisle from me there was a little boy, five or six years old, listening intently while cuddling a Teddy bear – to the most senior and all the ages in between. Like Simon Bates, I never cease  to be amazed at how, over two hundred years after his death, Mozart still manages to pull in such crowds.

The concert opened with the Overture to The Impresario (Der Schauspieldirektor), a surprisingly well developed piece, bearing in mind that the opera is only a one-act comedy, devised for entertainment at court. The Academy of St Martin in the Fields led by the experienced Mozartian baton of Carlo Rizzi delivered an excellent performance, capturing all the satirical humour, typical of the piece.

This was followed by some of Mozart’s best arias for soprano. All four pieces are vocally demanding, requiring a brilliant coloratura, refined phrasing and a wide vocal range. Mozart composed the first three arias especially for Aloysia Lange, his wife’s sister, who was a great singer. According to the programme notes, the first,  Vorrei spiegarvi, o Dio!, was not  a Mozart original  but was from the opera Il curioso indiscreto by Pasquale Anfossi. At Aloysia’s request,  Mozart rewrote the aria, specifically suit her voice. The second and third arias were two concert works that Mozart himself composed to show off the brilliant flexibility and colour of Aloysia Lange’s singing.

The young American soprano Cyndia Sieden delivered an assured, effective performance of all three arias although perhaps slightly short of my expectations, after the great critical acclaim she enjoyed as Ariel in Thomas Adés’ The Tempest, at Covent Garden  in 2007. Her voice is beautifully crystalline and clear in its middle range but still a little thin and inconsistent at its highest. While she has an excellent technique  her diction is not always perfect; it was sometimes difficult to tell whether she was singing in Italian or German and  she did not seem totally confident in the use of these languages.  The two German arias fared better than those in Italian. Ms Sieden seemed particularly hesitant during the first aria and compared somewhat unfavourably with the interpretations by other great coloratura sopranos, such as Natalie Dessay, although clearly she still has time to develop.

The last aria, the famous Der Hölle Rache from The Magic Flute with its series of high Fs was Ms Sieden’s best performance of the evening. She tackled it with energy and power, delivering a glittering interpretation, again slightly  short of the standards set by the great exponents of the repertoire.  Nevertheless, Ms Sieden’s performance was on the whole excellent, giving the audience half an hour of pleasing and very fine singing.

The much anticipated Requiem came after the interval. As is well known, Mozart’s last composition, left unfinished  reached a wider audience than usual from its inclusion in Milos Forman’s Oscar winning film  “Amadeus”, based on Peter Shaffer’s play of the same name. The version presented here was the one orchestrated and completed by Mozart’s assistant Franz Xaver Süssmayr, at Constanze Mozart’s request after her husband’s death.

The Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the Mostly Mozart Festival Chorus are very much at home with this kind of repertoire and the Requiem holds few,  if any, unforeseen challenges for them. Carlo Rizzi’s expert direction drew out  a powerfully dramatic interpretation of the work, unsurprisingly perhaps given his long career in opera. To my mind, the Requiem is one of Mozart’s most poignant compositions, written in the key of D minor, a key he had also used for some of his most emotional works, like the Piano Concerto No. 20 or his opera Don Giovanni, and its inherent quality of sadness is perfectly suited to a mass for the dead. The piece is essentially driven by the chorus as even the four soloists seldom sing alone.  Carlo Rizzi displayed a full understanding of this particularity. He had the orchestra in the standard layout, with the choir at the back and the soloists unusually placed between the two. Together, they delivered a powerful Requiem that filled the hall with extraordinary sound.  The music is of course dark, but it is always subtle, sublime and touching,  its deeply human potrayal of pain and loss transcending artificial social barriers.

Carlo Rizzi, fully aware of the human aspects of the piece and its choral characteristics, led the Festival Chorus, the four soloists and the orchestra through a vivid, moving and luminous rendition of this masterpiece. The four soloists were excellent with a special mention for bass-baritone Andrew Foster-Williams whose rich and colourful tone perfectly matched the trombone at the beginning of Tuba Mirum in the third section, creating a “duet” of rare beauty.

This final night of Mostly Mozart 2008 was an excellent  concert, which reflected the wide range of contrasting emotions present in Mozart’s music, undoubtedly an important factor in  his enduring popularity.

Margarida Mota-Bull

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