Mozart’s connections with Bath are, at best, tenuous, but every November for
the past 18 years there has been a Mozartfest in this perfect Georgian city,
where the spirit of the 18th century — Bath’s heyday, as well as Mozart’s —
lives in the ubiquitous sandstone. Mozart may never have visited the city,
but several of his friends did: his childhood companion, the English prodigy Thomas
Linley, and Joseph Haydn, who stayed at the home of the retired castrato
Venanzio Rauzzini, a Bath resident from 1777 until his death in 1810.
Earlier in his career, he had sung the first performances of Mozart’s
celebrated motet, Exultate, jubilate, and the male lead, Cecilio, in his
Milan opera, Lucio Silla (1772). Haydn marked his visit by writing a “round”
in honour of Rauzzini’s dog.
A Bath Haydnfest would be even more appropriate, perhaps, but Mozart obviously
draws bigger crowds, and Mozartfest’s artistic director, Amelia Freedman,
invariably does her bit for the older composer, whose music suits the
civilised ambience of the resplendent, intimate Guildhall and the larger
Assembly Rooms as perfectly as Mozart’s. Mozartfest is essentially devoted
to chamber music — although this year’s offerings included a Mozart opera
(Glyndebourne on Tour’s Die Zauberflöte in concert) and choral and
orchestral music — so no doubt the father of the string quartet will
loom large in 2009, the bicentenary of Haydn’s death.
In any case, Freedman’s programming has always ranged wider than Mozart and
his contemporaries, and her long career in classical music — she is the
founder-director of the elite chamber group the Nash Ensemble (another Bath
resonance, there) — ensures the consistent quality of artists drawn at the
festival. Over 10 days, the programmes may not be especially challenging —
the Mozartfest receives no public money and relies entirely on sponsorship
and box-office receipts to break even — but the masterpiece quotient is
high. To hear great music in such appropriate surroundings is a rare treat.
Indeed, I can think of few more enjoyable experiences than listening to the
Quatuor Mosaïques playing Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven string quartets
in the beautiful, acoustically superb Guildhall, a delectable “cake tin” of
a room in pastel greens and burnished golds, whose interior might have been
designed by Josiah Wedgwood.
The first music I heard in this lovely hall this year was Schumann’s, a
selection of lieder from his Op 25, Myrthen, shared by the soprano Kate
Royal and the tenor Mark Padmore, with that master-accompanist Roger
Vignoles at the piano. With Widmung (Dedication), Der Nussbaum (The Walnut
Tree) and Die Lotosblume (The Lotus Flower), Royal took more than her fair
share of the best-known “myrtles”, while Padmore brought his special brand
of introverted intensity to From Hebrew Melodies, an undeservedly neglected
song, and Du bist wie eine Blume. Their voices — her shining lyric soprano
with a hint of metal in the timbre, his grainier, plangent tenor — contrast
well, yet they also make a good blend in the handful of Schumann duets and
the delightful Rossini encore with which they concluded the evening.
Royal is one of the most-touted young British singers today, and it’s easy to
see and hear why. This is a classy package: a tall, slender, handsome woman
with chiselled features and a musical polish beyond her years. Her peachy
tone, mostly reliable intonation and understanding of the words are
self-evident, but I wish she would savour the sound of the texts more
vividly. Words ending in plosive consonants tend to blur into vowels. One
doesn’t want her to copy great German lieder singers of the past, but she
could learn from the purchase they get on concluding consonants and the
rhythmic lift it gives to the music.
Between the two tranches of Schumann, Royal and Padmore duetted in Handel —
the sublime As steals the morn upon the night from the Milton-based oratorio
L’allegro, il penseroso ed il moderato — and in a Monteverdi tryptych: the
Dialogo di ninfa e pastore (Dialogue of a nymph and shepherd), and Ardo e
scoprir (I burn, yet cannot reveal my passion) from the Eighth Book of
Madrigals, and the final Poppea-Nero duet (almost certainly not written by
Monteverdi himself) from L’incoronazione di Poppea. Inevitably, such music
now sounds strange with a piano, rather than period instrumental,
accompaniment, and the sensual embrace of the vocal lines is lost when Nero
is sung by a tenor, but both Royal and Padmore are versatile and stylish
singers of baroque music. The Handel — which both have recorded with
different partners — was the highlight for me. Padmore is a front-ranking
Handelian, and Royal, on this evidence, should be one, too.
Another fine British soprano, Rebecca Evans, was the star of the first half of
Sir Charles Mackerras’s programme with the Orchestra of the Age of
Enlightenment at the Forum, a former cinema now used mainly as an
evangelical church — Bath has no other suitable large concert hall, alas.
Mackerras’s credentials as a great Mozart conductor and scholar were
spotlighted in a predominantly Figaro sequence that began with a zesty
account of the Overture and was followed by four arias with Figaro
connections: the Agnus Dei from the Coronation Mass, whose theme is a
pre-echo of Countess Almaviva’s Dove sono (which Evans decorated with
written-out embellishments taken from the Agnus Dei), and two alternative
Susanna arias: the elaborate Al desio written for Adriana Ferrarese,
Mozart’s new prima donna for the 1789 Vienna revival (and eventual first
Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte), and the unfinished Non tardar, amato bene,
completed and orchestrated by Mackerras. Evans is a revered Susanna about to
embark on her first Countess for Welsh National Opera (next February), so
this was an ideal outing for her in both roles, her shining soprano in peak
condition, her sense of style immaculate. If only she could have ended with
Susanna’s heart-stopping Deh vieni rather than its interesting but
anticlimactic prototype. Even so, the OAE woodwinds got their chance to
shine, especially in Al desio, with its dark basset-horn (an early alto
clarinet) colourings. Beethoven’s Pastorale Symphony followed in a reading
that exuded bracing alfresco sounds — a torrential storm! — and jovial
rusticity, the antithesis of “the countryside viewed from the autobahn in a
passing Mercedes”, David Cairns’s unforgettable description of a super-sleek
Karajan performance in the 1960s.
