~ Author: Ben Weaver
Tuesday August 6th, 2019 - This concert at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center saw the return of Joshua Bell to the stage of David Geffen Hall for Antonín Dvořák’s popular Violin Concerto, with.the Festival's music director Louis Langrée on the podium.
Dvořák’s concerto, full of dancing Czech folk melodies (mostly written by Dvořák himself) and achingly lovely romances, has been a concert hall staple for more than a century. Joshua Bell has performed it often. Unfortunately, over the past few years, a stringency has entered his playing; and so it was this evening. In the playful and dramatic sections, attempts to get more volume and expression from his instrument felt desperate and the sound turned sour and hard. There was little joy of the Bohemian folk dances to be had. It is only in the more lyrical sections - the second movement was quite lovely - that the old, rich, full-toned Joshua Bell sound reappeared.
The finest moment was the encore, a transcription of Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat, Op. 9, No. 2 (transcribed for violin and orchestra by Bell and Ben Wallace.) The hushed beauty of this piece was Bell at his finest.
Also on the program was Mozart’s Symphony No. 38, “Prague,” written in 1786. Usually overshadowed by the three monumental symphonies that followed (Mozart’s last three), “Prague” is one of my personal favorites and it was lovely to hear it again, especially in the exciting performance Maestro Langrée and Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra gave us. It is an unusual symphony for Mozart in that it consists of only three movements; why Mozart chose to only compose three is not known (he may have been trying to appeal to the followers of the Prague composer Josef Mysliveček, a friend of the Mozarts whose symphonies consist of only three movements), but the absence of a Scherzo gives it an effective compactness.
Composed the same year as Le Nozze di Figaro, and anticipating some of the most dramatic passages of Don Giovanni (written the following year), Mozart also writes liberally for the wind instruments; the virtuosity of their wind players is something Prague orchestras were famous for at the time. The virtuosity of the wind players of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra is also not to be underestimated. They received an especially warm ovation from the public when Maestro Langrée called them for their bows.
Zoltán Kodály’s Dances of Galánta (1933), like so much of Dvořák’s music, is steeped in native folk tunes (in Kodály’s case it’s Hungary.) Although unlike Dvořák - who usually wrote his own melodies - Kodály used many pre-existing folk tunes as his starting point. Galánta is a town in what is now Slovakia, about 35 miles from Bratislava, where Kodály lived for a time. He had a wonderful ability to discover and re-compose folk tunes, casting them in his own musical language, and Dances of Galánta is one of his most famous works. The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and Maestro Langrée nearly danced off the stage with their breathless and breathtaking performance of this exciting and memorable work.
~ Ben Weaver