Mozart and Beethoven: both Vienna
Last date, tonight, at 20.30 in San Benedetto, for the XIII edition of the Piano Solo Festival as part of Salerno Classica, with Yuri Bogdanov and Maria Letizia Michielon, in dialogue with the Italian Lirico Ensemble
By Olga Chieffi
Halfway point for Salerno Classica, conceived by the Associazione Gestione Musica, an articulated project that saw funding from the Single Fund for Entertainment in the New Instances 2021 section, with the project “Celebration, Tradition, Innovation”, 15 concerts involving the towns of Benevento, Amalfi and Brienza as well as the municipality of Salerno, which supported the event. The third and last appointment of the XIII edition of the “PianoSolo … in ensemble” festival, hosted by Salerno Classica, will take place this evening, in the Church of San Benedetto and will present a comparison between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven, central figures of Viennese classicism . Moving from Salzburg to Vienna in 1782, Mozart established a precedent that in the history of music, of musicians, of their relations with institutions and with the public, counts as no small revolution. Mozart in Vienna had embarked on the path of the independent artist without either patrons or permanent positions in courts or churches. The rich musical offer of the capital of the empire made this choice possible, but no less risky. Mozart in fact decided to address a large and partly new audience compared to the past, made up not only of educated connoisseurs but also of simply curious, with the result of having to face the change of tastes and fashions. At the time of his arrival in Vienna the to assert himself was rather: the concert seasons for clear. The paying public could support either an entire series of concerts, in the case of the most prominent or wealthiest personalities, or by purchasing titles for individual occasions. The Piano Concerts which he presented himself, in which he presented the role of the composer performer, piano were those at best and were the genre Mozart devoted himself with more intensity. The Concerto KV 414 n ° 12 in A major, which we will hear in the version for piano and string quintet by Yuri Bogdanov and the Italian Lyric Ensemble, which features Daniela Cammarano and Francesco Pisanelli on violin, Mattia Cuccillato on viola, Francesco D ‘ Arcangelo al cello and Luigi Lamberti on double bass, was published in 1785, but probably dates back to 1782 and is among the first that he presented to the Viennese. More than virtuosity as an end in itself, Mozart, as always, prefers the coherence of musical conduct. In the first movement, Allegro, it is the different sections of the orchestra that enunciate the material taken up and reworked by the piano. The finale, Allegretto, composed at a later time to replace the original Rondò now cataloged KV 386, is particularly rich in ideas that bind to each other with extraordinary lightness and without ever daring a sensation of accumulation. In the Andante located in the center, Mozart takes inspiration from a work by Johann Christian Bach, La calamita de ‘cuori, which the piano has the game to assume and comment on by introducing new melodic ideas. Second part of the evening dedicated to Ludwig van Beethoven with the performance of the Concerto for piano and orchestra n. 5, in E flat major op.73, the “Imperatore”, entrusted to the expert keyboard of Maria Letizia Michielon and the Italian Lyric Ensemble. The opera, composed in 1809, is the absolute last of his concerts and he writes it in a difficult historical moment that will also shake his acquired serenity, that is when the no longer esteemed Napoleon will put Vienna on fire, to force him among other things, to hurry up from his home on Walfischgasse and elsewhere. “The existence I had just managed to create rests on fragile foundations […] How much ruin and desolation around me, nothing is heard but drums, cannons and people suffering! ». The work in reality, as in other contests, is not affected by so much affliction and the martial steps of some themes are not necessarily to be justified by virtue of these reasons. Not even the name “Emperor” has anything to do with this historical event and was not wanted by Beethoven, who in any case dedicates the work to his imperial highness the Archduke Rudolph of Austria. The idea comes from his friend the publisher and pianist Johann Baptist Cramer, who wanted with this epithet to emphasize the solemnity of the dominants, in particular in the motifs with which he shares the key of E flat major, and the fifth, for the epic character. Of the many novelties attributable to this concert, the harpish piano cadence at the beginning stands out immediately, among the pauses of three categorical orchestral chords, as a preamble to a theme raised by the violins. A large composition in three paintings, where the second movement has the severity of a choral while the third, the Rondò – Allego, is equally atypical in the magnificent dialogic structures between the piano and the orchestral sections, to herald the romantic future of this form.