Mozart Matinee at the SF Symphony

The all-Mozart concerts at the San Francisco Symphony last week were a successful, joyful surprise. I went to the opening on Thursday afternoon, where the audience demographic skews heavily towards elderly women, a sophisticated bunch who know their classical music.

Incidentally, in years past the men's bathroom on the Van Ness side of Davies Hall was turned into a women's bathroom for these matinees to alleviate long lines, but this year there's a new policy where anyone can use any bathroom they want, since stalls are stalls no matter the gender.

The guest conductor was Bernard Labadie, an early music specialist who in 1984 founded Les Violins du Roy, a celebrated chamber orchestra in Quebec City. In a 2023 article by Kyle MacMillan for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra: "Even though the CSO performs on modern instruments, Labadie will nonetheless bring a historically informed sensibility to his approach to these works. "That’s what I do for a living," he said. “Orchestras that invite me are willing to go down that path. Otherwise, there’s no point to have me and have the Chicago Symphony play this repertoire the way they would have played it under Georg Solti 40 years ago. So, yeah, I will definitely bring my own signature. At the same time, the purpose has never been and never will be to try to turn the Chicago Symphony into a period-instrument band.” Last week Labadie performed similar miracles with the San Francisco Symphony, and I don't think I have ever heard them play Mozart so well.

The first half of the program was a grab-bag of obscure Mozart pieces, starting with a bracing account of the overture to his final opera, La Clemenza di Tito. This was followed by two concert arias sung by the splendid British soprano Lucy Crowe, who had the audience instantly entranced with her crystalline, colorful, flexible voice. Al desio, di chi r'adora was written as an alternate aria for the character of Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro for a singer who wanted something flashier than the original Deh vieni, non tardar. Then she sang Ruh sanft, mein holdes Leben from the unproduced 1780 escape-from-the harem, German-language opera Zaide. It turned out to be one of the most gorgeous arias Mozart ever wrote and Crowe did it full justice. After a respite with five minutes of Masonic Funeral Music which the program notes called gloomy, but which were actually enjoyable, Crowe returned with a bravura aria written for a soprano to interpolate into Paisello's 1782 The Barber of Seville, 35 years before Rossini's version wiped all others out of the repertory.

After intermission, Ms. Crowe returned with Non temer, amato bene, another interpolated aria from Mozart's opera Idomeneo, accompanied in passages by Alexander Barantschik on violin. It was an exquisite performance.

The concert finished with Mozart's Symphony No. 39, a favorite, especially for its Andante con moto movement where a simple melody is repeated, expanded, and becomes heartbreakingly rich by its end. In the MacMillan article, he writes: "For Labadie, a historically informed tack primarily centers on texture and articulation. “Textures will be more transparent,” he said. “It’s not about heft, it’s not about weight. It’s more about having a sound that allows us to hear through the music, to hear through transparency how the music is built and look at it from a different angle. So the sound cannot be thick. It has to be pliable.” Such transparency then allows the conductor to focus on articulation, which he called “the absolute essence of this music.” The idea is not to re-create the past but to use every bit of knowledge that is available about how this music was written, performed and received to shape a fresh way of performing it for contemporary audiences."

Virtually all of San Francisco's principal players were present in this reduced size orchestra, and they were listening keenly to each other while looking energized and happy throughout. It was a treat to experience, and a fitting finale for the ensemble before Davies Hall turns into a Christmas factory for the month of December.