Review
Do you have a wishlist of great musical happenings, ancient or modern, at which you would love to have been present? Top in mine is the evening of 19 January 1787, when Mozart’s D Major Symphony was performed at the Prague theatre. After the symphony, by popular demand, the stage was stripped of everything but the clavier, and Mozart sat down to play. What followed, according to the eyewitness account of Franz Xaver Niemetschek, “exceeded anything normally understood by pianoforte playing, as the highest excellence in the art of composition was combined with the most perfect accomplishment in execution. Just as the concert had no parallel for the citizens of Prague, so Mozart counted this day as one of finest of his life.”
Though we will never know for certain how Mozart’s playing sounded, we are fortunate that there are musicians like Geoffrey Govier, who plays Mozart with brilliance and passion and has made a lifetime’s study of the instruments and styles of the period. His recital and talk last month, in which he was joined by the distinguished violinist Catherine Mackintosh, was supremely exciting and illuminating: among the finest musical evenings of my life, for sure. He played a copy by Christopher Clarke of a Viennese instrument by Anton Walter of 1795, while Mackintosh played a 1703 Grancino restored to eighteenth- century playing condition. He began by playing the Piano Sonata in B Flat, K.570. After this he talked about the differences between modern and period instruments, illustrating them by playing passages first on the Walter/Clarke and then by comparison on our Grotrian-Steinweg. Finally, he and Mackintosh played the Violin Sonata in G, K.379.
In presenting his persuasive case for the period instrument, Govier demonstrated how a powerful modern piano can cause the player to submerge or obliterate some of the finer points in a score. He played the opening of the B flat piano sonata (K.333) in which Mozart supplies a base line that is an interesting tune in its own right. Far from being the workaday left-hand accompaniment you often find in sonatas of the period, it requires just as much emphasis as the more obvious melody in the right hand. The balance is difficult (but not impossible) to achieve on the modern instrument, mainly because the middle and lower registers have chunkier strings. This means that the performer can unwittingly slip into a style which is biased towards the right hand he needs to make sure that the upper melody gets a fair hearing and over- compensates accordingly. By contrast, in a pianoforte like the Walter/Clarke, the dynamics are even throughout the whole keyboard, resulting in an extraordinary balance and clarity, that really comes into its own in Mozart’s sophisticated skippings from key to key and intricate contrapuntal work in the left hand.
I was surprised by the power and brilliance of the Walter/Clarke, which, incidentally, seemed perfectly suited to the acoustic of the church. However resolutely your mind and ears might be closed to period performances, you would have found Govier’s account of the B Flat Sonata (K.570 as opposed to K.333) irresistible. I’ve heard, live, six artists of the first rank play this, the sixth being Govier, and only two sent me away feeling that I’d heard a definitive performance. One was Govier (playing the Walter/Clarke) and the other Brendel (playing a Steinway at the QEH); which brings us to consider our feelings about period versus modern instruments.
There is a tendency for us to think that one piano (1790s or modern) is pretty much the same as another. The fact is that all pianos (1790s or modern) are dramatically different in ‘feel’ and tone and they all respond very differently to the acoustic in which they are placed. Govier told us with great relish how he was once in the Esterhazy Palace where there were ‘three Steins, all of them different ‘ and, it would seem, each of them outstanding in its own way. Bearing such diversity in mind, perhaps it might be mistaken to suppose that only the period instrument can do Mozart justice. For example, I would give anything to hear Govier play Mozart on one of the light-actioned instruments made by Erard in the late nineteenth century. There is one at Yale, on which Madeleine Forte performed and recorded Chopin. The woody tone and quick decay rate of the notes (i.e. they don’t last as long when you’ve hit them!) surely mean that you could achieve a remarkable level of clarity when playing eighteenth century keyboard music. And how come players like Brendel (and less famously but equally significantly Charles Rosen) manage to sidestep “the K.333 problem” when playing modern instruments? And what if Mozart had had a modern instrument what would he have done? And so on. The argument (when enthusiasts get together) can be prolonged and complicated when the gloves come off, but it is at least that rare thing in modern life, an argument worth having.
Govier and Mackintosh are recording the Mozart violin sonatas for release next year, the anniversary. We are looking forward to that. The Sonata in G K.379 was given a breathtaking account by Govier and Mackintosh, her Grancino being as ideally suited to the church acoustic as the fortepiano. Once again, because of the balanced dynamic of the keyboard, one was able to distinguish many subtleties that might easily be lost in larger halls on more recent instruments (often, put crudely, the piano obliterates the violin entirely). In the opening adagio, and the singing andantino which directly follows it when the violin comes in, we were able to hear every gradation of tone and colour from both instruments. The finale, a splendid set of variations, rounded off the evening. There really was a sense of freshness in the performance if you closed your eyes you could imagine you were listening to Mozart and Brunetti giving the very first account, Brunetti from a hastily written out fiddle part, Mozart playing the accompaniment flawlessly from memory! The Govier/Mackintosh recordings, when released, will be a revelation.
Words are inadequate to express the enthusiasm and love for their art (and Mozart’s) that Govier and Mackintosh communicated to us on this October evening nearly 250 years after the composer’s birth. There are, however, words adequate to express the rather poor attendance at the concert but I’d better not deploy them here!