2008 Festival Review
Conductor Cleve continues to surprise, please with his Midsummer Mozart offerings
By Rich Scheinin for Media News
July 25, 2008
It's the 34th year that conductor George Cleve has brought his Midsummer Mozart Festival to the Bay Area, and the surprises keep coming. They really do. Somehow it's always surprising to come under Mozart's deep spell as Cleve conducts his favorite music with absolutely no fuss, just fondness and understanding. And then there are the soloists he recruits, year after year, who aren't necessarily famous, but, like Cleve, seem emotionally engineered to perform this music.
Thursday night at the Santa Clara Mission, where Cleve and the Midsummer orchestra performed the festival's second program, it was pianist Nikolai Demidenko, a Russian living in Spain, playing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor. This guy is a poet: balance, clarity, a feathery touch — but with a bite, the sign (or sigh) of worldly experience. Thoughtful, confident beauty permeated his performance; Demidenko even bowed beautifully.
The first movement, the Allegro, opened with the massed, dramatic sound of the orchestra, followed by Demidenko's pearly lines, tumbling about. He seemed to be nesting inside the orchestra's silk pillow, ice skating with his right hand, dropping staccato attacks into his left, elegantly assembling the magic jigsaw of Mozart's music, and then rising, with the orchestra, to a pitched attack.
Then, the cadenza: Demidenko played it in blockbuster fashion, with huge, clean gestures: a big surprise and a little off-the-wall; this was the cadenza written by Brahms for the concerto. Cleve turned around to watch, smiling and eating it up.
A moment later, Demidenko brought a sense of solace to the Larghetto: a man lost in reflection. In the Allegretto, the finale, he slew the set of six variations on the theme, a march, playing with pared-back Baroque austerity, then delineating the score's thick, gleaming counterpoint. Among the voices leaping out of the orchestra were those of Maria Tamburrino, principal flute, and Laura Griffiths, principal oboe; a super performance, all around.
Enjoying himself, Demidenko sat back down and played a couple of encores: first, a Chopin mazurka, emerging as a rich reverie, then a Scarlatti sonata, conveyed with butylene-torch focus.
Earlier in the program, Cleve conducted Mozart's Serenade in B-flat, K. 361, for small wind orchestra and double-bass. Infrequently performed and nearly an hour long, it's a friendly bear of a piece, with hints of raucousness in all those closely massed wind instruments: two oboes, two clarinets, two basset horns, two bassoons, and four horns (a pair in F and a pair in B-flat).
Nicknamed the "Gran Partita" — a grand suite, in seven movements — it's regal and reflective, but not overly so. You can imagine it being played a couple of centuries ago as a backdrop to libations in a Viennese beer garden.
Thursday's performance was pretty rough-hewn, especially early on. But Cleve gradually brought his players around, coaxing a cozy performance, warm and affable: comfort food. Best was the sixth movement, in which the ensemble set up a slow, droning flutter-coo, with Griffiths, a sensational player, soaring on the breezes with butterfly wings.
Contact Richard Scheinin at rscheinin@mercurynews.com or (408)920-5069.
