Florence Mozart, Cherubini, Handel Weekend

Even in the ‘off-season’, there’s always something on in Florence. This weekend, it was Mozart, Cherubini and Handel which captured my attention.

When the ‘season’ ends in Europe, it’s time to enter the ‘Festival’ time. Most sensible money-making festivals start and end within the July and August holiday times. Now that tourists are around all the year, especially in places like Florence, you find festivals popping up at all times between the end of season in April and the beginning of the new season in October or November.

You might assume that a festival called ‘Maggio Musicale Fiorentino’, or ‘Maggio’ as it is called in Florence, would take place in May? After all, ‘Maggio’ is ‘May’ in Italian. Actually the ‘Maggio Musicale Fiorentino’, summer festival begins at the end of April and ends in July. But the ‘Maggio’ concerts of the Maggio Musicale orchestra, with Zubin Mehta conducting, go on all year. I was fortunate to catch the concluding concert of last year’s ‘Maggio’ season; the Mahler Second Symphony in March. A few week’s later, I went to the first presentation of the new festival season which was ‘Götterdämmerung’.

‘This week’s concert was remarkable in the fact that it was not conducted by Mehta. Alexander Lonquich was to conduct the Schubert Ninth Symphony and direct whilst playing a Mozart Piano Concert. With such a good orchestra, rehearsing and conducting the Schubert would presumably not have presented too many problems.

The symphony is a hefty undertaking and we were not disappointed by the performance, although one could not help thinking that we would have liked Mehta there for that particular piece.

The Mozart Piano Concerto was a very different kettle of fish. From the start, the music was more Romantic than classical; more in the tradition of European film that the authentic sound of Mozart. Personally I imagine that Mozart would have loved this mannered performance using a Model D piano. Just imagine what music would have been written if this instrument had been around in 1785!

The dialogue between the piano and the orchestra was obviously very marked, as the soloist – conducter hands over the line to the woodwind and accepts it back to the piano. Lonquich’s interpretation went ‘all the way’ with rubato and expression but it was very tasteful and certainly masterly. From this evening, I am thinking that if we are to use a magnificent modern piano that can create effects that Mozart could never achieve, then perhaps it is OK to go further with their use. Lonquich just got in there and did it!

But of course the pianist Lonquich could not resist playing a wonderful substantial Schubert solo encore. This performance was stunning.

There are always a number of events held on weekends. One of them this weekend was a flag throwing competition. Various teams from different parts compete complete with their individual costumes and flags. But they also bring their own drums and trumpets to play. This is probably to distract from the times when they actually drop their flags. They all seem to have at least one good snare drummer whilst the rest thump tenor drums. The trumpets used by most groups have modern fanfare instruments.

On Saturday evening there was a concert in the small courtyard of the Bargello. The space was ideal for sound. Cherubini was the subject of the concert billed as “Cherubini: Il Grande Modello di Beethoven e Brahms”. We think of Cherubini as a French composer but he was in fact born in Florence and trained in Italy before travelling abroad and ending up in Paris.

After a series of pleasant vocal pieces, we heard a beast of a piano work; the Capriccio of 1789, with unending strings of sequences and other devices. The string quartet of 1835, written at the age of 75, was a surprise to me. It was beautiful but with an extraordinary use of texture. The playing by an all-female string quartet was excellent with a very sensitive feeling for the music. I will certainly investigate more of Cherubini’s late chamber music in the future.

The final treat of the weekend was a performance of Handel’s first Italian opera, ‘Rodrigo’. The plot sounds very complicated. However, I did like the original title, ‘Vincer se stesso la maggior vittori (“To overcome oneself is the greater victory”). But it served as a marvellous base for some of Handel’s early music.

Before Handel went to London, he travelled to Italy where he learned techniques which would serve him well for the rest of his life. ‘Rodrigo’ was his first attempt at opera at the age of 22. It has been recently reconstructed from available music so we were lucky to see this performance in Florence.

The Pergola theatre is still the original structure put up in 1654. It’s the oldest surviving theatre in Italy. Handel’s ‘Rodrigo’ was first performed in 1707 at another theatre just down the lane whose replacement can no longer be used. So it was exciting to see Handel’s first opera back in town after 302 years. It was also nice to know that Handel composed opera for Florence before he ever used the London stage.

Most of the singers managed the incredibly difficult colleratura passages admirably and one of them faked strings of notes to reach the ends of phrases spot on time. It didn’t matter. It gave us all an extremely good idea of how mature Handel’s technique was at this stage of his life. However, we do have to hope that the ‘reconstruction’ of this opera did not involve too much ‘creative musicology’. Judging from the vocal writing we heard, it seemed to me that his compositional skills in 1707 already warranted the hiring of the expensive castrati he employed later on.

The band was excellent. I was happy to see an array of instruments not listed in the programme such as natural trumpets and extra double reeds. The theobo player working with the keyboard and baroque ‘cello continuo was an interesting feature. The instrument used was a classic Italian theorbo. In tuttis, he would change to guitar and really drive an exciting uptempo rhythm. The recitatives seemed (Again, I suspect we have to rely on the degree of ‘creativity’ in the ‘reconstruction’ for this sort of judgement) as mature as Mozart’s later in the century. That was a surprise to me.