The delights of this festival include excellent pre-concert recitals as a bonus — in this case, the main program was preceded by an accomplished performance of the extraordinary Piano Quartet in E-flat major of Mozart, the second of his two essays in that genre. The musicians included Ruggero Allifranchini — the concertmaster of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra — on violin, Shmuel Katz on viola, and Ilya Finkelshteyn on cello, but most remarkable was the sensitive playing of the celebrated Leif Ove Andsnes on piano, the soloist for the concert proper.

 

A wonderful chamber arrangement by George Benjamin — last year’s composer-in-residence for the festival — of a Canon & Fugue from Johann Sebastian Bach’s great swan song, The Art of the Fugue, opened the program played by the Festival Orchestra under the able direction of Louis Langrée, who stressed the focus on counterpoint in Mozart’s oeuvrein remarks before the performance. Andsnes returned to the stage for a sterling account of the beautiful Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20. Determined applause elicited a splendid encore, a lesser-known but inspired Nocturne by Frédéric Chopin — the Op. 15, No. 1 — for whom Mozart was an exemplar.

 

The second half of the program opened with the magnificent Anton Webern orchestration of the Ricercare from Bach’s The Musical Offering — this was played at a slower tempo than I have usually heard, which reduced some of the excitement even if it produced a more elevated effect, an approach which was handsomely redeemed in the magisterial conclusion. The evening concluded impressively, with a confident reading of Mozart’s exquisite, late Symphony No. 38, the “Prague”, which displayed the composer’s employment of counterpoint as the result of his studies of Bach in the last decade of his life.

 

The second week of this year’s Mostly Mozart Festival delivered another rewarding evening of music of the Classical era on Wednesday, August 3rd, in Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, repeating the program of the previous evening.