Word: mozartians
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...there are some who find Sachertorte unappetizing, the waltz old-fashioned and the Danube dismally dirty. But they belong to a special class of people that Austrians consider teppert, or slightly mad. Even more than Milan, Vienna is the heart and soul of opera land, the city of melodic Mozartian fantasy and thunderous Wagnerian pageantry. Every coffee house has its tables of self-appointed critics; taxi drivers know all the gossipy details of each new backstage feud. Though impoverished Austria badly needed more practical things after World War II, one of the government's first major building activities seemed...
From the ceiling of the Capitol office hangs a magnificent chandelier, circa 1802. Its crystals oscillate freely. They touch and tinkle in a sparkling Mozartian minuet. But hark! Whence comes this counterpoint that shivers the crystals into new and shimmering song? It comes from the man behind the desk-a big-handed, big-boned man with a lined, cornfield face and greying locks that spiral above him like a halo run amok. He speaks, and the words emerge in a soft, sepulchral baritone. They undulate in measured phrases, expire in breathless wisps. He fills his lungs and blows word-rings...
Siepi booms out this amiably imbecilic libretto with Mozartian brio, but his face is as unbending as Alan Ladd's. As the girl in Giovanni's life, brunette beauty Michele Lee owes all her best lines to nature. Though only 19, she seems to have acquired the false vivacity and hackneyed mannerisms of generations of musicomedy ingenues. Swooping about the stage like a benign witch out of a child's storybook, fortyish ex-Ballerina Maria Karnilova, who plays a mate-hungry widow, is remarkably agile and refreshingly comic...
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...