Musical Calling Cards From Way Back When

By BERNARD HOLLAND
Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven by the Mahler Chamber Orchestra on Friday night would have fit nicely under the title “Giving Them What They Want.” At Carnegie Hall, Pierre-Laurent Aimard was conducting three pieces and playing the piano in two of them.
Haydn’s late B flat Symphony (No. 102) represented salesmanship at its most sublime. This was written on his second trip to London, and by then he had figured out how to tease, shock, amuse and touch his English clientele. Trick codas taunt the listener’s expectations. The unexpected, managed with an amazing sense of balance, becomes the better than expected.

The second of four piano concertos Mozart wrote in the key of C (No. 13, K. 415) was part of a Salzburger’s campaign in the 1780s to win fame and fortune in Vienna. The string of concertos that followed was prime material for private evenings in great houses and subscription events that Mozart produced himself, sometimes selling tickets from his own front door.

The Beethoven B flat Concerto (No. 2) arrived, also in Vienna, in 1795 and advertised a 25-year-old pianist hot in pursuit of a virtuoso career but also eager to challenge Haydn’s originality as a composer. Art for art’s sake is hard to come by in these three pieces. Mozart described it best: “There are passages only the connoisseur will really get, but they are written so that everyone else will like them without knowing why.”
The Lucerne Festival Orchestra, both as a unit and piecemeal, had a busy five days in New York. Its core is the talented Mahler Chamber Orchestra, which has the look and sound of all things young. Mr. Aimard, who has won the world over as a pianist, was its precise, high-energy conductor on Friday.

There is an element of reflection and repose in the great Haydn symphony that I think a young conductor leading young players will always have trouble settling into. What I missed here was the presence of a wise man approaching old age looking on with wry amusement at his music and its effect on others.

Wouldn’t it be nice to hear Mr. Aimard with an orchestra of old folks, stirring things up yet subject to the gravitational pull of age and experience? Wouldn’t it also be nice to hear an older musician conducting the younger ones, occasionally tapping the brakes on this high-performing, new-model conveyance?
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