"The Genius of Mozart". Sheldonian

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website.

The title of this concert made it sound like it was going to be the classical music equivalent of Highlights from Hamlet: maybe we’d get the theme from Elvira Madigan, Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and home by 8.15. Instead, it was a brilliant and full rendition of three stunning Mozart pieces that don’t normally find their way onto Now That’s What I Call Classics.

But this concert was more significant even than a clutch of Mozart meisterworks: the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra is celebrating its Silver Jubilee in 2023, and this was the first concert of the year. Tonight’s conductor, Marios Papadopoulos, was the founder of the OPO, and has been its Musical Director ever since; and the piano soloist, Alim Beisembayev, was born in 1998, the same year as the orchestra itself. These details lent the evening a sense of joy and significance that matched the music.

Marios Papadopoulos himself had the air of the least dictatorial maestro you could imagine. A Totoro of a man, with silver hair and a genial expression, he eschewed keeping time with his baton, and instead gently teased emotion from his instrumentalists with graceful waves and expectant looks. Sometimes he seemed to be conducting with no more than an avuncular smile. And the players responded. There’s a look string players get when performing light Mozart pieces like the first one tonight, Divertimento, K.136: they toss their heads lightly from side to side, as if skipping through a meadow full of buttercups. Somehow, after that first tune, the cold and the rain seemed very far away. Mozart was sixteen when he wrote it. OK, we know he was a child prodigy, but how was this possible? And by this point he’d already produced six operas and twenty-two symphonies. Had he been in the audience at the Sheldonian tonight, he would have been the youngest one there.

The second piece was the 25^th Piano Concerto. Often overshadowed by the ever-popular 21^st and the career-topping 27^th, this one only really came to prominence in the later Twentieth Century. I’d never heard it before, but it’s rich, complex and full of surprises – not least the appearance, in the first movement, of possibly the most famous motif in the entire classical canon: the four sonorous notes that open Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony. There they were, twenty years before Beethoven himself immortalised them. There was also some distinct prefiguring of Beethoven’s 4^th Piano Concerto. So this is where he got his ideas…. The Genius of Mozart indeed.

The young soloist, Alim Beisembayev, from Kazakhstan, played with passion and restraint. This was no diva. He let his fingers do the talking, and they positively sang. Rather than the erect stance you normally see with pianists, he sat hunched over the keyboard, watching over his dancing fingers with an almost abstracted fascination, like a kindly zookeeper watching two incredibly talented performing gerbils. It was electric. Three curtain calls later Alim returned to treat us to a one-man virtuoso encore. For this his hands became a blur, and I swear at one point he was playing all the notes on the keyboard simultaneously. It was so impressive that I even noticed the left eyebrow of the 2nd Cello rise slightly in aroused appreciation. The person next to me texted her friend in the Circle (who she claimed was an expert) to ask what the encore was. He replied ‘That is Liszt’s Appassionata Transcendal Etude if I’m not mistaken.’ Only in Oxford.

The final piece of the evening had personal significance for me: the 35^th Symphony, also known as the Haffner. During my student days at Merton College in the 1980s I used to listen to it on what I now believe to be a stolen record player, while trying to avoid writing essays but kid myself that I was still doing something useful by imbibing culture. It had lost none of its magic, moving from insouciant squeaks on a single violin to full-orchestra climaxes in a matter of moments. Even the Timpanist, Tristan Fry, finally got something to do, and he went for it quite literally with a bang. Mozart composed this one in bits and pieces in his spare time to celebrate the ennoblement of a member of the aristocratic Haffner family, and when he later got the manuscript back from his father, even he was surprised how good it was. It heralded his last sequence of seven symphonies, which stand as possibly the greatest riches of his legacy.

The Haffner is famous for being a twenty-minute symphony. Tonight the OPO did it in nineteen. I guess that shows you how much energy they had. They were light, they were bouncy, they were friendly, they were fun. And at the end the second violinist kissed the first. To be honest, I nearly did too.