Soloists Shine at Mozart's Birthday Recital

Assisted by a bevy of soloists and readings of the wunderkind’s letters, the Mozart Society Orchestra (MSO) put on a clumsy, exuberant, and thoroughly enjoyable concert celebrating their namesake’s 250th birthday on Saturday Feb. 24 in Lowell Lecture Hall.

Under the creative guidance of Music Director Akiko Fujimoto, the orchestra lacks technical polish across all sections, and has trouble achieving the mountain air clarity that Mozart demands. As the program was stuffed with familiar classics, the technical limitations of the orchestra were on full display.

The first movement of the 38th Symphony was the low point. It is complex and intellectually demanding music which requires sensitive leadership and a fully engaged orchestra. Yet Fujimoto’s on-stage relationship with her players rarely moved beyond metronomic. The sound was fractured and flat, the structure confused, and some of Mozart’s most fascinating music sounded little more than boring.

The group of soloists all played admirably. Kathryn E. Andersen ’07 and Brendan J. Gillis ’06, soloing in the “Sinfonia concertante for violin, viola, & orchestra,” communicated beautifully, handing melodies off to one another with facility and grace. Soprano Amanda Forsythe was terrific singing the aria “Misera, dove son!”.

But pianist and composer Aaron L. Berkowitz, a second year student at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, was the clear standout.

His performance of the Adagio movement from Mozart’s “Piano Concerto No. 23” was novel in all the best ways. Foregoing the sumptuous melodic slush favored by many pianists who look for any available opportunity to jerk Romantic tears from a sympathetic audience, Berkowitz crafted lines that were detached, but wrenchingly so. Playing like the person who learns of the death of a loved one and does not know how to tell the rest of the family, his performance was intensely moving.

Orchestral problems persisted throughout the evening and were sometimes highlighted by the soloists’ work, but these can only be harped on to a limited degree. Sure, the overture to “Cosi fan tutte” seemed occasionally on the verge of falling apart, but it never did, and it was enthusiastic and palpably exuberant in ways that many virtuosic performances are not.

Fujimoto needs to learn to conduct with her orchestra rather than at them, and the players need to pay more attention to each other. Yet these problems are not irreconcilable by any stretch. What MSO needs most is more practice, but hopefully that is why one joins a college orchestra in the first place: for the joy of getting better as a group.