Mozart Perfection Midsummer: Emanuel Ax performs Mozart at Tanglewood, August 7, 2011…and a Triumph for Young Bringuier, by Seth Lachterman
Tanglewood Music Festival
Boston Symphony Orchestra, Lionel Bringuier, Conductor
Emanuel Ax, Piano
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat Major, K.482.
Bedřich Smetana, “The Moldau” from Má Vlast
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Opus 64
While the Mozart concerto is about thirty minutes compared to Tchaikovsky’s fifty-minute symphony, its richness and diversity seem more expansive than in the Russian’s fateful masterpiece. The E-flat Major concerto from 1785 is not the most frequently performed of Mozart’s Viennese concerti, and the innovations in outer movements are sometimes disparaged in comparison, say, to the K. 450, K.488 or K.503. No one disputes the luscious wind writing in these movements, nor the joviality of the finale that includes an interpolated menuet sounding like something from Le nozze di Figaro, which Mozart was writing at the time. Repeated hearings, though, of the first Allegro will convince anyone of its nobility, warmth, and structural ingenuity. To my ears, the finale is pure ambrosia.

