Word: mozartian
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Michael Senturia, the principal conductor of the evening, chose a formidable program, demanding Stravinsky (his Symphony of Psalms) and sprightly Beethoven (the Second Symphony). It takes great temerity on the part of any college conductor to think of scheduling even the Beethoven, which is not the silly little Mozartian nothing many people think it, let alone the Stravinsky, which does have the simplicity, order and concentration of the best of Mozart...
Enthusiasm and confidence, indeed, were a distinctive feature of the evening. In the first half of the program, the orchestra, solus, attacked the more-than-Mozartian Beethoven with refreshing vigor. Too often enthusiasm is the mark of the obvious (like Sir Arthur Sullivan) or the sloppy (like Dmitri Mitropolous). But the HRO has struck a balance: their performance of the Second Symphony was robust and remarkably successful. Mr. Senturia's tempos were well chosen, his dynamics well modulated, his orchestra's tone large and rich. And if the winds sometimes seemed a bit lost, the strings were at their best...
...clean, rich clarinet tone was outstanding. Russell Stanger, beginning his second season with the orchestra, conducted the work in the first two movements as if it were by Richard Strauss. Only in the last movement did conductor, orchestra, and soloists loosen up enough to capture some of the Mozartian good-humor that makes this piece a perennial favorite...
...imaginations could grasp. The prose is, however, a superb vehicle for the pamphleteer and any page of it is a model of the art of conducting unfair arguments. He was a highly original artist and the art lay in the transmuting of disruptive debate into a kind of classical Mozartian music. The plays date most seriously when they are debates, yet the verbal wit is perennially irresistible. There is no writer who so conspicuously and largely holds the whole social and political and intellectual life of a long, rich period of heresy and revolt in his hands, a revolt against...
...whether Strauss ever expected Ariadne to be a box-office hit. A small-scaled "chamber opera" without a chorus, it uses an orchestra of only 37 instruments, one of them an organ. A confused story-within-a-story and a stage-within-a-stage set mix Grecian mythology with Mozartian opera bouffe. The three leading roles, all sopranos, are among the most difficult to sing in all opera...