Concert Review: Beethoven Takes Over

Opening night of Mostly Mozart, 2013.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet ponders the future of commuter rail.
Photo by Guy Vivien © 2011 Verbier Festival

Attending the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra's first subscription concert of the 2013 summer season, one would think that this venerable arts festival's main focus this year was on the works of Ludwig van Beethoven. Beethoven was everywhere on this program, with three major works by the thunderer from Bonn bracketing two smaller arias by Salzburg's favorite composer. This focus on Beethoven will continue throughout this year's Festival, as major artists engage with five of the symphonies over the course of the next month.

Concert Review: Funeral for a Friend

Lutoslawski, Bartók and um...Mozart at Mostly Mozart.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The pensive Jean-Efflam Bavouzet. Photo © 2012 Paul Mitchell for the BBC Proms.

On Friday night, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra played one of its more interesting programs of the 2012 schedule, placing Mozart's Symphony No. 39 in conjunction with two closely related 20th century works, the Musique funèbre by Witold Lutoslawski and the Third Piano Concerto by Béla Bartók.

These two modern works are connected by death. Bartók wrote the Third at the very end of his life, as a birthday present for his wife. He did not live to orchestrate the last 17 bars. Lutoslawski's four-movement work for divided string orchestra is a musical gravestone for the Hungarian composer, a moving portrayal etched in broad ink-strokes.

The Musique funèbre is a good example of what can be done using serial technique. The compostion is built from tone-rows, unconventional arrangements of notes that bear no relationship to the standard ascents and descents of the scale. Mr, Langrée unlocked the potent ideas in each of these small movements, bringing the work to its powerful apogee before dwindling to nothingness on the note where the composition originally started.