On an evening of excellence, a performance of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante in E flat major, K364 took pride of place in the Beethoven-Saal, Stuttgart. Alina Ibragimova and Nils Mönkemeyer turned out to be the perfect couple while the camerawork covered the action like it was a soccer match.
Marc Minkowski started off the SWR Symphony Orchestra at a good clip with a rich abundance of texture and inner life that pulsed with the divided violas at the core of the string section. Ibragimova and Mönkemeyer entered, sounding like the light and dark sides of a violin – her eyes so locked in on his at times that you could swear they were having an affair – and Mozart followed. They allowed their free musical passion and gorgeous timbres to be swept away as the music affected them, they didn't resort to any predictable stratagems or interpretive approaches, although they know HIP inside out. They abandoned many of the long legato bowings that make sense in different kinds of interpretation. Their cadenza was more serenely spontaneous about affection than about being a cadenza; they never gave in to the temptation to do more than Mozart wrote, and their final trill was preceded by the string player's familiar nervous tic of a plucked open string which you only get when they are deeply immersed.
The intensity of the cadenza in the Andante exceeded anything that had come previously, more deeply into the sounds of their instruments; it was appropriate that the French horns sounded a sad farewell to the movement as if it had been an aria. The competition between violin and viola heated up in the Presto; flashing their way to the end, Ibragimova threw in heartbreaking portamenti and flirty staccati, Mönkemeyer almost destroyed his viola with his four violent up-bows preceding his final trill before Ibragimova picked up the gauntlet and finished with four lightning down-bows that ignited her final trill. Amazing. Masks back on, exeunt the players.
The concert opened with a Haffner Symphony of lean but sumptuous weight, broad string playing, internal clarity and punch in which Minkowski fostered a comprehensive dialogue between the instrumental sections and colors. The clarinets gave the overall fabric a seductive warmth and sounded wonderfully exotic in the occasional solo passages they had, the woodwinds overall played their key linking passages with Mozartian moaning sighs. The momentum continued through the first movement's double bar as if the music had been conceived as one long thought.