1765: Times of Transition
Academy of Ancient Music
Laurence Cummings, Amanda Forsythe
Mozart: Symphony No.1in E-flat major
Philidor: Arias from Tom Jones
Haydn: Symphony No.39 in G minor
Telemann: Ino
One year, four composers, with a 76 year age-gap between them. Laurence Cummings and the Acadmeny of Ancient Music (AAM) opened their new season in Milton Court with Mozart, Haydn, Telemann and Philidor representing the year 1765 during a transitional age in music. It was the era of sturm und drang, the dramatic ‘storm and stress’ movement in German music and literature that emphasised deep emotions, individual freedom and love of nature. Along with the works of literature from the likes of Goethe and Schiller, came the musical reaction to the rational approach of the Enlightenment and Baroque and the start of the Classical period, a prelude to the upcoming early Romantic era. Composers such as Haydn, Gluck, and Mozart included elements of this genre, not least in angular themes, rapidly changing musical moods, and dramatic interventions. In opera, the increased use of fully orchestrated accompagnato recitatives took over from the baroque basso continuo genre.
The symphony generally accepted as Mozart’s first was composed at the scarily young age of 8 while he was in London, although it was not the one described by his 12-year-old sister as being composed while their father was poorly and they were forbidden to play the piano. Although he wouldn’t have known it at the time, the symphony shows several elements of the sturm und drang style, notably at the very start when the strident opening arpeggios are followed by a quite dreamy sequence. The atmospheric slow movement is built on a hypnotic repeated five-note phrase in the bass leading to the lively finale.
A French example followed with two excerpts from Philidor’s musical version of Tom Jones, with Laurence Cummings vocally filling in the storyline. Attempts by the principal oboe player to turn it into an oboe concerto including playing too loudly and adding several flourishes that, at least to me, seemed inappropriate. A youthful Haydn followed, his Symphony No.39 being one his first pieces in the stormy style, particularly the opening and concluding movements. The two intervening movements are in the Galant style that slots in between the Baroque and early Classical. It is noteworthy for featuring four horns in two pairs in different keys enabling a wider scale that the traditional pair in one key. Only rarely did they play together.
We finished with Telemann’s continuation of the story of Semele, as told in Handel’s 1744 (operatic) oratorio. Handel’s tale on the tale ends as Semele, having rather foolishly insisted that the god Jupiter appears in his ‘godlike’ form, is reduced her to a pile of cinders by the resulting thunderbolt. Telemann picks up the story when Bacchus, the child of Semele and Jupiter (in his human form), somehow arise from the ashes of his mother, and is taken in by Semele’s sister, Ino, the subject of this cantata. Juno, Jupiter’s long-suffering wife (and, apparently, sister), continues her battles by managing to get Ino’s husband to murder one of their sons, and attempts to kill the other, as which Ino leaps into the sea with the currently surviving son, both of whom are translated into sea gods.
The soprano soloist in this and the Philidor was the recent Grammy Award-winning American soprano, Amanda Forsythe, who had recorded the role in America. She had an agile and focussed voice that was clearly approved of by the audience, although I found her unremitting vibrato, producing a trill on every note, to be excessive. Generally composed in a more Galant than Sturm und drang idiom by the 84-year-old Telemann, it featured some attractive orchestral colour from two flutes, replacing the oboes.
