Strong debut by Igor Levit at the Mozart Week
The joy at the Salzburg Mozart Week is great, because after last year’s festival, it can take place again this year with an alternative program. not everything went smoothly, because there were a few cancellations until the end. However, this turned out to be very positive for the concert in the Great Festival Hall with Robin Ticciati and Igor Levit on Saturday.
For the pianist Igor Levit, who stands in for Maria Joao Pires and Martha Argerich, the Concerto in A major for piano and orchestra was the debut at the Mozart Week. Despite his young age of 39, Robin Ticciati has been a regular guest since 2009 the festival and conducted for Daniel Barenboim. What they both had in common: a gentle but firm hand for Mozart’s music.
The interlude music to the play “Thamos, King in Egypt”, with which Ticciati and the Vienna Philharmonic opened the concert, is reminiscent of one of the two scenic productions that could actually take place in Rolando Villazon’s first Mozart Weeks. But Ticciati needed neither actors nor scenery to be able to tell a solemn story peppered with attention to detail and cleverly set accents.
Igor Levit then strode across this festively rolled out carpet with Mozart’s Piano Concerto K. 414. The work, which Mozart himself described in a letter to his father in 1782 as equally interesting and beautiful in sound for both connoisseurs and non-connoisseurs, is striking for its poetic character, with Levit’s gentler tone hand and a well-dosed sense of calm and inwardness, fully and completely. The audience was more than enthusiastic about this soulful Mozart interpretation and gave great applause and cheers.
After the break, we continue with a Mozart Week classic, the “Linzer Symphonie”. A work that the Vienna Philharmonic has often encountered, not only during the Mozart Week. So there was no routine, Ticciati kept the orchestra busy with dancing tempi. Mozart wrote the work in 1783 during a stopover in Linz, when he caught himself on the journey from Salzburg to Vienna. He never returned to his home country until his death. Hopefully this will not be the last visit to the Salzach for Robin Ticciati. Judging by the big final applause, the audience would also like to die.
(SERVICE – https://mozarteum.at/mozartwoche#info)