Mozart, Among Others

 The venue for the Princeton University Concerts is the Richardson Auditorium of Alexander Hall.  This delightful building, a roofed arena of Byzanto-Romanesque mien, dates from 1894.  The great architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, here to give a memorable lecture made more memorable by the fact that he delivered it brilliantly despite having had his large box of slides stolen from the Faculty Club while he was having lunch, declared it the most interesting building in Princeton. For decades when the institution was much smaller, it was used for all sorts of solemn ceremonies.  Later, with the large expansion of the university it could no longer serve those purposes.  So the interior underwent a magnificent acoustical upgrading, becoming a superb musical venue: Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall.  You may have noted that university buildings aspire to as many names as possible.  Plural appellation maximizes the confusion of campus visitors, and helps create one of the absolutely indispensable conditions of academic traditionalism and elitism—the dichotomy between an in-group in the know and an out-group anxiously clutching little indecipherable campus maps.  Furthermore the institution can honor the generosity of two major donors at a single blow.  More bucks for their bang, so to speak.  Be that as it may, we were delighted that relaxing Covid conditions made our trip out to a Sunday afternoon concert seem nearly as unexceptional as in the good old days.

 

Alexander Hall 

 

Though I am now long retired and increasingly removed from campus affairs, having some residual friends in high places continues to prove advantageous to me.  For many years our concert seats were in the upper tier of the elegant semicircle that is the interior of Richardson Auditorium.  These were lofty, nearly avian perches allowing a comprehensive and superior view of the whole of the stage and most of the rest of the audience.  But reaching them involved climbing a spiral staircase that leaves even some student athletes in training breathing hard.  One day a couple of years ago we found that our seats had been silently but impressively switched to the very front row of the ground floor (orchestra).  This unsolicited promotion, a response to visibly advancing age and creakiness, puts us about five feet from the stage and seldom more than twelve feet from the soloists, looking up at them at an angle of about fifteen degrees.  Fantastic acoustics and leg-room.  It’s a little ostentatious, but somebody’s got to sit there.

 

Richardson Auditorium

 

Sunday’s performance was a long and uninterrupted recital (about ninety minutes) by the brilliant Icelandic pianist, Vikingur Olaffson.  Mr. Olafsson is a tall, well-built, handsome fellow with a youthful but commanding stage presence.  He is not yet forty but looks as though he were not yet thirty.  He was wearing a quite blue blue suit, tieless, but with a white dress shirt fully buttoned up to the chin, black patent leather shoes, emphatic thick- rimmed glasses, and a wedding ring.  It all added up to what you might call serious, contemporary, minimalist, functional elegance.  Mr. Olafsson was in town because the genius who runs the concert series, Marna Seltzer, is imaginative, well-connected, and entrepreneurial and can sometimes  persuade artists to add a brief trip to Princeton on one side or the other of a scheduled appearance at Carnegie Hall in New York.  The reputation of the programs she has created, working with the law of the conservation of musical energy, has several times paid off for our Princeton audience in this regard.  Carnegie Hall and Richardson Auditorium are now peers.  

 

 

The superb program, which was called “Mozart and Contemporaries,” appears to be similar if not identical to that featured under the same name on one of his hotter Deutsche Grammophon disks.  There were fifteen works—nine by Mozart, two by Baldassare Galuppi, two by Domenico Cimarosa, and one each by Haydn and C.P.E. Bach.  If the performance had been nothing more than an exhibition of the man’s powers of memory, it would have been astonishing.  The very list of names—from the possibly most famous in eighteenth-century Europe to a couple that might send you in the direction of Groves’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians-- highlights the intellectual concept behind Olafsson’s performance.  That is the concept of context.  Artists often preface or supplement the music they perform with a few interesting, illuminating, or annoying remarks.  Olafsson began with what I thought was a brilliant micro-lecture of perhaps seven or eight minutes.  All Scandinavians seem to speak English, just to shame us.  Olafsson, who studied at the Julliard, speaks a virtually unaccented, elegant, educated American English unapproachable by any of the American politicians who have been endlessly talking through the interminable period of our mid-term elections.  “Mixing the celebrated and the obscure, I hope to slightly alter our psychological attunement, removing some of the baggage we all bring with us to Mozart’s music…to approach even the best-known works of Mozart with the same freedom and childlike enthusiasm I felt upon discovering the rare and staggeringly lyrical works from the likes of Galuppi and Cimarosa.”

 

He explained that the overwhelming genius of Mozart flowered in the context of a larger musical efflorescence, some understanding of which actually enriches one’s appreciation of that genius.  If the only thought you have ever given to this—and I fear I here indict myself—is in the cartoonish way that the film Amadeus presents the competition with Salieri, you are likely to have a pretty superficial view of a rather deep subject.  There was something wonderfully generous and expansive behind the pianist’s little talk, a generosity that found its parallel in the scrupulosity with which he addressed the keyboard of the huge Steinway rising from the stage before me, practically within my own reach as it seemed.  One passing remark sticks with me.  It was about Haydn, one of whose sonatas featured in the program.  According to Olaffson, Haydn was one of few of Mozart’s contemporary composers with the breadth of skill and energy of application actually to understand in its fulness the younger man’s achievement.  Haydn applauded that achievement with an open enthusiasm in which there was room only for admiration and thoughtful praise.  “Of course he was himself a very great musician,” said Olaffson.  But he didn’t stop there.  He added: “he was a great human being.”  I do not recall ever before hearing a great artist in any field praised by an expert critic as a great human being.