Louis Langrée began the final week of his 21-year stint leading the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra with an incoherent but enjoyable program that skipped through five centuries of music history.
The program began with Valerie Coleman’s Fanfare for Uncommon Times, a two-year old piece for brass and percussion. As one expects from Coleman, the piece honors, subverts and ultimately transcends its genre. Rich triadic consonances from the low brass slide into nerve-wracking dissonances and back without any feeling of resolution, punctuated by eerie bowed vibraphone. There are stirring trumpet calls and pounding timpani and crashing cymbals, yes, but also an insistent triangle groove, unsettling commentary from a marimba and a chaos of repeated, syncopated chords from the brass. It comes across as a sketch of the American mood in 2021, and hits the nail squarely on the head.
The evening’s centerpiece was rising young star violinist Randall Goosby’s performance of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto. Goosby has a charming presence and ease onstage, and is well on his way to being an audience darling. He has the requisite virtuosity for the role, certainly, with fluid runs, clean figuration and a rich but not overripe tone. His approach to the 19th-century warhorse was similar to that of other young soloists I’ve heard recently: to strip away the accumulated layers of schmaltz and give a straightforward and direct rendition, hinting at suppressed emotion rather than making every moment moltissimo espressivo – a Romanticism for the post-ironic age. This makes the occasional flash of angst or wit that more telling.
One of the things I will miss most about Langrée is his skill as an orchestral accompanist. He took his cue from Goosby’s relaxed, low-stakes take, making the passages of orchestral foreground vivid and colorful but never overwrought. Goosby’s encore was Louisiana Blues Strut by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, an amalgamation of syncopated fiddling with virtuosic double-stop writing not dissimilar to certain passages in the Tchaikovsky.
Any threads connecting the three pieces after intermission to the first-half material, or to each other, were tenuous at best, but each had its virtues. The MMFO did a very passable imitation of an early music ensemble in selections from Lully’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, leaning into the dance provenance of the music, aided by some period percussion instruments and a guest theorbo player. The orchestra obviously regarded the piece as a hoot, with wide grins evident on the faces of many of the string players. Langrée had the percussionists march to the front of the stage while playing the last selection, mostly so we could see the instruments, which included a Turkish Crescent – essentially a stick with bells that jingle when struck on the floor. Mozart’s Overture to Die Entführung aus dem Serail is proof that not everything he wrote was genius. The performance of this merely adequate piece was also adequate.
Langrée introduced Zoltán Kodály as a contemporary of Bartók’s; Langrée seemed to view Kodály’s Dances of Galánta, the evening’s final work, as a miniature version of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, a love letter from a departing conductor to his ensemble. It’s not an unapt comparison; there are section solos – especially woodwind – abounding, and the Klezmer- and Roma-inspired melodies played to the orchestra’s rhythmic and coloristic strengths. Principal clarinetist Jon Manasse made the most of the haunting, structurally important cadenzas. One of the virtues of the informal nature of these concerts, with their program notes delivered from the podium, has been to invite us into the orchestra’s world. If this world involves jokes and some tearful goodbyes right now, that’s only to be expected.
