Boisterous, fizzing Mozart made up most of this New Year’s Eve concert from Aurora Orchestra and Imogen Cooper, doubling as another entry in their five-year exploration of Mozart’s piano concertos. We began with the overture to The Marriage of Figaro, exemplary of an approach to Mozart’s music that was muscular and immediate, yet spiked with plenty of festive citrus zest. Aurora blends modern instruments with a few period inflections (natural trumpets and tap-timpani with hard sticks), and eschews vibrato for reasons of colour and texture rather than doctrine.
Using (relatively) large forces in a small hall makes for a distinctive experience: lots of volume and immediacy – rarely have I heard Mozart sound so fortissimo or as unvarnished – but also a kind of immersive transparency. At times this hard-bodied, unmediated sound could be a little claustrophobic, and some of the lightness of Figaro sometimes got lost in what could feel like big band Mozart (more buff than buffa).
Some equilibrium returned when Imogen Cooper joined the orchestra for Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 17 in G major. Her approach offset Aurora’s ebullience with a wry, at times comic, understatement and deftness of gesture. The chromatic twists and turns of the first movement had the kind of wrong-footing friskiness that told us the musicians were having a lot of fun, as was Cooper herself, whose polished and unfussy phrasing led us through the exposition and stormy development with wit and clarity.
Despite the gentle playfulness of its prevailing G major and fruity chromatic digressions, it is a concerto with some moments of surprising darkness, which were often moments of special musical and expressive intensity (particularly in the minor key variation of the final movement). The slow movement showcased superb woodwind playing – bassoonist Paul Boyes shone all night – whose floating arabesques were delivered with unerring musicianship and a keen sense of ensemble. Cooper’s playing at the minor key entry of the main theme was inward and melancholy, deliciously withdrawn and giving the work dazzling emotional range, and her restraint throughout the performance balanced Aurora’s more Byronic take on the music. The theme and variations finale featured more feathery virtuosity from Cooper in the piano interjections, and a soulful minor key interlude; Aurora’s horns blazed rudely and triumphantly in a comic, almost Rossini-esque finale.
Aurora’s Mozart had a sort of supercharged fury – espresso martini rather than the fizz of vintage Champagne – whose fieriness was cleansing and purifying rather than just freshening. There were plenty of moments of repose in Mozart’s E flat Symphony no. 39 – the gently swaying return of the main theme after a stormy development section in the first movement, for instance – and it was never once vulgar nor garish. But the muscularity and energy they found in the highly motivic first movement seemed to presage Beethoven’s Eroica more than anything else, with decisiveness of attack and textural density that was full of Romantic darkness and intensity. The diminished harmonies and crunchy dissonances that pepper the first movement were daringly abrasive, a mood established in the fulsome drama in the third chord of the symphony’s slow introduction, which the runs in the violins propulsive and determined rather than merely decorous filigree.