SSO Mozart festival comes to magnificent end

The curtain fell on David Robertson’s triumphant Mozart mini-festival in a blaze of glorious music and equally glorious playing from Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

David Robertson and the SSO’s Mozart mini-festival came to an end in a blaze of splendour. Picture: Bob Barker

• Mozart for the fevered brow
• Journey of light and shade
• Double Decca slice of piano history
• Beethoven for that desert island

THE curtain fell on David Robertson’s triumphant Mozart mini-festival in a blaze of glorious music and equally glorious playing from Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

Appropriately for a farewell the program included the composer’s last work in two genres — the piano concerto No. 27, played with wonderful authority by Emanuel Ax, and the Jupiter Symphony.

The concert was branded Magnificent Mozart — following on from the opening “dramatic” and middle “seductive” programs — and like them opened with an overture, with two piano concertos straddling the interval and closing with one of Mozart’s last three symphonies.

The formula worked very well, not only because of Ax’s peerless pianism and genial stage manner but also because the orchestra fizzed and sang under Robertson’s dancing baton.

INTERPLAY

This program got off to a helter-skelter start with the overture to the Marriage of Figaro — four minutes of high-octane fun featuring some wrist-breaking fingering from bassoonist Matthew Wilkie — before Ax appeared to play the 19th of the 27 concertos Mozart composed for the Viennese audiences.

Emmanuel Ax performed six concertos in the Mozart festival. Picture Lisamarie Mazzucco

The work — which features some charming interplay between soloist and the wind instruments in the middle movement — shows the composer at his most humorous and in the final movement there’s even a short fugue passage, foreshadowing the famous finale to his 41st symphony which closed this program.

But the highlight of the night was Ax’s performance of the concerto No 27, the premiere of which was Mozart’s last public performance. Here again the “conversation” between Ax and the orchestra — particularly the SSO’s top notch woodwinds — was a highlight.

DETAILS

● CONCERT: SSO Magnificent Mozart

● WHERE: Sydney Opera House Concert Hall

● WHEN: Friday, February 10