“An historic concert event not to be missed!” shouts the Tanglewood Festival’s website in anticipation of a concert this Sunday afternoon. What could this concert possibly consist of? Perhaps something like last Saturday’s delightfully varied anniversary gala that brought a good part of the who’s who of the classical music world to Lenox? Or maybe something along the lines of Andris Nelsons’ much acclaimed Tanglewood debut the following afternoon?
Not quite. The program for this “historic concert event” consists of the following repertoire: Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Mozart’s 24th piano concerto, and Mozart’s Symphony no. 36. Come again? Yes, the Boston Symphony is billing an all-Mozart concert as historic!
How’s that, you ask? Well, let’s take a closer look. Kurt Masur and his son, Ken-David, are sharing conducting duties. Now I’m not aware of the last time a father and son tagged-team conducted an orchestra concert at Tanglewood, Symphony Hall, or anywhere else, for that matter (Erich and Carlos Kleiber in Vienna, perhaps?), so this could be the historic element the BSO is plugging.
Or maybe not. Reading on in the advertisement, the BSO marketing team tells us that all-Mozart programs were “a popular model in the early years of the festival.” Well, if that doesn’t clear it all up! There’s historical precedence for this type of programming (an excuse we’re hearing a lot of this celebratory summer season), so the logic seems to go, and that – combined with the talents of Ken-David, Kurt, and pianist Gerhardt Oppitz – will ensure an afternoon event that mustn’t be missed. Well, at least we can hope so.
Now I’m not knocking Mozart: while I may have a low opinion of Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the Linz Symphony is an old favorite, second in my opinion only to the Jupiter Symphony, and the C minor piano concerto is perhaps my favorite of the Mozart twenty-seven. But the conceit that an all-Mozart program is somehow a novelty is not a little misleading and thoroughly disingenuous: all-Mozart (and all-Beethoven) programs are not at all uncommon at the BSO, either in Boston or at Tanglewood. Why, just last week, Anne-Sophie Mutter reprised one of the all-Mozart programs with which she opened the BSO’s 2011-12 season. No mention of “an historic…event” occurring then. For those with longer memories, in the 2008-09 season James Levine conducted 12 of Mozart’s 41 symphonies over the course of three winter programs. It seems these all-Mozart programs turn up for the BSO with not too much infrequency after all. If they happened to be common at Tanglewood 75 years ago, so be it, but doesn’t that say more about a lack of creativity in programming, the trenchant conservatism of BSO audiences and donors, and of the orchestra’s habitual willingness to “play it safe” with repertoire over the last three quarters of a century than anything else? It sure seems that way to me.
This tendency to “play it safe” was especially evident over the last few years of Mr. Levine’s tenure in Boston. What began as an invigorating exercise in creative programming (the East coast premiere of Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs; the Ives Second Symphony; a night of Stravinsky, Carter, Duttileux, and Bartok; the Schoenberg and Beethoven violin concertos side-by-side; and so forth) ended as something much more ho-hum. The low point surely was the Beethoven symphony cycle slated for the autumn of 2009. Even with Mr. Levine scheduled to conduct all nine scores, the series smacked of an effort to balance the books rather than make any sort of serious, artistic statement on the music, especially coming as it did on the heels of the challenging and thrilling Beethoven/Schoenberg retrospective Mr. Levine directed between 2004-06. In the event, of course, Mr. Levine withdrew from the concerts for health reasons, though Symphony Hall was packed (as one might have expected) for guest conductors who instead led the programs. At least the money counters were happy.
Now there’s certainly more to be said on this theme, but I’ll address it later, either here or in the Arts Fuse. At any rate, I do hope that Sunday’s concert lives up to its billing. Surely, there are few better living Mozart conductors than Kurt Masur and Mr. Oppitz is a pianist you should definitely hear in this concerto. As for its being “an historic concert event,” well, I’ll leave that up to fate. Every concert should at least have that potential, even if they don’t all get the same attention from the BSO’s marketing department.
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