This Royal Liverpool Philharmonic concert sheltered under the rubric “A Festival of Mozart”. But no birthday cake with 250 candles was wheeled out. There was not much festivity in the music-making either, even with the beckoning presence of Nicola Benedetti, currently everyone’s favourite young British violinist.
With these Mozart performances, alas, we heard the sounds of duty rather than commitment. The worst offender was the opening movement of the Linz Symphony, No 36: no snap to the rhythms, pallid sonorities.
Likewise Benedetti, at least at the moment. Enormously gifted, the BBC Young Musician of the Year of 2004, now 18, is still in the chrysalis stage. Give her something romantic and exotic, such as Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto, and she digs right in and blossoms. Give her the classical elegance of Mozart’s Third Violin Concerto and she currently stands outside, twiddling the surface. She handled decorative details prettily, but mislaid the music’s wit.
Gerard Schwarz and the orchestra were culpable, too; the concerto’s winking last bars were limp celery incarnate. Still, let’s also remember the brighter aspects, such as the adagio’s sweetly muted strings, or the overall sound balance — light and compact, Mozartian in size if not properly in spirit.
With Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel also on the bill, the concert’s label could as easily have read “A Festival of Strauss”. Strauss is certainly in Schwarz’s blood or thereabouts.
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Don Juan found the orchestra exuberantly focused and alert, slithering about deliciously with the slinking libertine. Until the prancing joker somehow conjured a sleepier response and Schwarz pressed through the piece’s chameleon moods with limited shifts in inflection. More wit mislaid.
Festival or not, this concert illustrated the difficulties of good musicians staying galvanised while trundling out the same old works. A packed house, though.