Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
          Violin Concerti

* Concerto No. 1 in B-flat, K. 207
* Concerto No. 2 in D, K. 211
* Concerto No. 3 in G, K. 216

Mela Tenenbaum (violin)
Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra/Richard Kapp
ESS.A.Y. 1070 Total time: 62:38

* Concerto No. 4 in D, K. 218
* Concerto No. 5 in A, K. 219 "Turkish"
* "Concerto No. 6 in E-flat," K. 268 (365b)

Mela Tenenbaum (violin)
Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra/Richard Kapp
ESS.A.Y. 1071 Total time: 71:07

Summary for the Busy Executive: Eye-opening.

I admit to a certain amount of crankiness toward Mozart.  Sure, he wrote
masterpieces, but on the whole I wouldn't leave the house to hear most
of his work.  For some strange reason, Haydn appeals to me far more -
quirkier, more surprising.  Mozart is so finished that listening to his
music often reminds me of a ride in a big old Rolls - very comfortable,
but not very interesting.

As I say, I realize most music-lovers think otherwise, and I admit I've
dropped my share of solecisms on the topic of Mozart's music.  The violin
concerti, with the exception of the fifth and its exciting "Turkish"
finale, seemed just to waste my time.  Then I heard a live Hilary Hahn
and the Cleveland conducted by Jahja Ling in the third, and the scales
began to loosen from my eyes.  This wasn't merely one of the great Mozart
performances, but one of the milestone concert experiences of my life.
The concerto matched Hahn's elegant, sweetly lyrical playing, and the
Cleveland proved an ideal accompanist.  This was Szell's ideal of
orchestral music as "chamber music, only with more instruments" realized.
It seemed as if every player lavished the same care on the subtlety of
line as the soloist.  I began to come around to the thought that it
probably wasn't coincidence that my favorite Mozart works I invariably
heard first from great performers.

God knows I'd heard the third often enough, from many different soloists,
both known and not-so-well-known.  How did Hahn differ?  Mainly, she
knows how to sing.  There aren't a lot of notes for the soloist, and so
each note has to count.  In this sense, the Mozart concerti prove more
difficult than the Tchaikovsky.  Hahn showed me that the melodies weren't
boring, but beautiful, and she seemed to sense exactly why.  I'd love
to hear her do the whole set.

To some extent, Hahn won me over because she presented a view of the
concerti very similar to my own - elegant entertainment rather than
heaven-storming or heroic or Romantically desperate.  Again, the concerti
suit her tone and her approach.  But what about somebody not Hilary Hahn,
someone like Mela Tenenbaum?  Tenenbaum's "violin personality" has a lot
more grit and tartness.  I associate her with the two Shostakovich
concerti, not because I've ever heard her do them, but because she has
the steel, the nerve, the insight, and the sense of drama.  In a certain
way, she's "wrong" for Mozart, just as Isaac Stern is.  Yet Stern's
recording with Szell and the Cleveland of the Mozart fifth remains,
surprisingly, one of his best, despite how much he may have hated working
with Szell.  Stern gave the concerto something more than mere suavity
and politesse, and Mozart benefited.  Tenenbaum doesn't deny her own
nature in serving Mozart.  The tone is slightly less big than usual, in
concession to the classical idiom, but this is a psychologically rich,
adult reading.  She gets "inside" the notes, turning them into music
that matters, not just to Mozartolators or to historians, but to who we
are now.  It's an intimate reading, in the sense that she draws us in
very close, as well as a "home-made" one. She doesn't resort to assembly-line
Interpretation with a capital I.  She's obviously thought about every
phrase, yet she sounds as if she has made everything up on the spot.  I
never realized the oddness, the unpredictability of Mozart's invention
here until Tenenbaum and conductor Richard Kapp made me appreciate it.
Listen, for example, to the unexpected delay in the first half cadence
of the opening movement of the second concerto or to the riddle of the
placement of the first full period in the opening movement to the third.

As a result of the Tenenbaum-Kapp account, I began to try Ernst Toch's
exercise of listening to a cadential period of a concerto movement and
then trying to guess the general substance of the bars to the next period.
I reacted like Toch: in every case, Mozart was sharper, unhackneyed, and
always threw in a little surprise, God knows where from.  And yet it
seemed so natural, so inevitable in context - maybe that's why it flew
over my head.  Basically, this recording taught me to listen harder.
Mozart's violin concerti may be a step away from the pleasantries of the
galante style, but what a step!

I stress the individuality of this reading.  Nobody walks on eggshells.
Nobody tries to sprinkle scented wig powder over these scores.  Tenenbaum
and Kapp avoid the sentimentally genteel.  Like Hahn, Tenenbaum knows
how to get the violin to sing in her own way, but she does sing.  Her
control over a range of color and dynamic astonishes me.  Mozart may
repeat riffs, but Tenenbaum never does them the same way twice.  She is
always in the groove of the phrase, which makes her crescendos and
decrescendos seamless and undistorted.  For me, the slow movements stand
out - absolutely glorious and free of the cliches of Mozart andante
playing: the feeling that you've wandered into Miz Wingfield's glass
menagerie.  These tracks have given me the most pleasure, and that's not
to slight the fast movements.  Tenenbaum makes the composer sound not
only elegant and entertaining, but wise.

The second CD includes the so-called sixth concerto.  From the day it
appeared, in the early nineteenth century, people have doubted its
authenticity.  Nevertheless, the liner notes assert this was the most
popular of the collection during the century.  Frankly, if it is Mozart,
then he composed it just after somebody beat him stupid.  I miss the
incredible control over the symmetry and asymmetry of phrases, the bizarre
surprises that appear in the authenticated five.  Some scholars claim
that some themes might come from Mozart.  But usually Mozart's themes
are the least of his work.  However, what he does with them makes the
piece.  Since everyone's speculating, I might as well stick my oar in.
It seems likely to me that Mozart's widow persuaded somebody in her
circle to dish up a Genuwine Mozart, perhaps from scraps left behind,
so that she could make a little money.  Something a bit like that happened
with the Requiem after all.  She tried to minimize the contributions of
Eybler and Sussmayr in her marketing efforts for the piece.  At any rate,
including this concerto does Mozart no good at all.

I love the music-making from everybody concerned on the disc - heimisch
in the best sense.  Everybody seems to play as if they enjoy each other's
company - the pleasures of minds in consort.  It's not mechanical, driven,
lockstepped, or even whipped into shape.  It's a conversation that grows
before us.  I've heard Grumiaux's, Szeryng's, and Suk's sets, and, as
far as I'm concerned, Tenenbaum and Kapp yield nothing.

Steve Schwartz