The Mainly Mozart Festival closed its 22nd season Sunday afternoon with a remarkably ambitious presentation that combined a medieval classic of world literature with a large work of Romanticism, and along the way featured a children’s chorus and a brand-new ballet.
For sheer guts and imagination, the festival’s mounting of Franz Liszt’s Dante Symphony in a two-piano arrangement with multidisciplinary and multimedia additions must rank as something of a triumph, and one that follows in the path of the its presenter’s short but significant history of elaborate finales that not incidentally introduce new dances.
Aside from one or two elements that made this presentation at Miami’s Knight Concert Hall less than seamless, this was a fascinating concert, a two-part look at collaborations that culminated in an elaborate version of the Liszt, in the composer’s own two-piano version that also included a children’s choir, the ballet and continuous video backdrops drawn from artists’s illustrations of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (the 750th anniversary of the poet’s birth is being celebrated this year).
The first half of the concert presented two arias by Mozart, one by Grieg, and a performance for two pianos of the Norwegian composer’s delightful arrangement of the familiar Mozart C major piano sonata (K. 545), played by artistic director Marina Radiushina and guest artist Grace Fong. The two women are splendid pianists, and this was a beautiful, seamless reading of the Mozart-Grieg. Although some might see Grieg’s arrangement as cultural vandalism, it comes off as a witty, respectful commentary on the original sonata, and this is because Grieg had taste, and he knew how to add something to the music without making a mockery of it.
The arias were sung by coloratura soprano Maria Aleida, who appeared May 31 in a Mainly Mozart concert featuring the world premiere of the String Quartet No. 7 of Richard Danielpour, has a light, expressive voice with a tonal quality that is able to turn on the dark colors when needed. Her reading of “Solvejg’s Song” from Grieg’s incidental music for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt was very straightforward, almost textbookish in the melancholy opening section, but with an agreeably light touch in the major-key second half.
The Grieg was followed by “Vorrei, spegiarvi, oh Dio!” (K. 418), which Mozart wrote as an interpolated aria in 1783 for an opera by Pasquale Anfossi, then a well-known and popular composer. Aleida’s tempo was too slow for this complex aria, though her tone quality was open and pretty; she sounded somewhat tentative, as though she had just learned it.
Aleida closed with “Die hölle Rache,” the rage aria from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. Although she hit her high Fs reliably, she sounded somewhat dry, and her come-down from the heights through the descending chord progression was on point, but not confident. Still, she knows this aria well and how to sell it to an audience, and the very large house at the Knight was on its feet after she finished.
The second half held the Dante Symphony, presented in what seemed almost like an illustrated lecture at first that opened up into a work of music and theater. Three giant screens hovered above the stage; the center one showed a film by Ali Habashi, a tour through Gustav Doré, the pre-Raphaelites and other artists who treated this subject, and it was masterfully done. Liszt’s three-part symphony was prefaced and interrupted by narration from Frank Cooper, the now-retired University of Miami musicologist whose urbane, scrupulously researched text was delivered expertly (Cooper’s warm, memorable Southern gentleman speaking style is a big plus).
Cooper’s text had quite a lot of exposition to get through in the Inferno part of the symphony, and Fong and Radiushina stopped frequently as he presented the story, which in Dante’s original is quite complicated and full not just of descriptions of hideous punishments but of the political inside-baseball of the late 13th and early 14th centuries in Dante’s home city of Florence. Thankfully, none of the Italian poet’s score-settling was in the presentation, but there is a good deal of explanation that needs to be done of the various circles of Hell and the appalling suffering its unhappy denizens endure on a permanent basis, and it got close to being tedious (much as I like the original poem).
The other difficulty here is that Liszt’s music is dramatic and bold, but somewhat uninspired in the Inferno; it’s pages and pages of unresolved diminished chords, and that makes for an underwhelming trip through the world of the damned. But with the entrance of the four dancers enacting the scene in which Dante and Virgil see the doomed lovers Francesca da Rimini and Paolo, this concert started to hit its stride.
Adriana Pierce, a corps member of the Miami City Ballet, using four of her fine colleagues — Michael Sean Breeden, Emily Bromberg, Leigh-Ann Esty, and Eric Trope — choreographed this scene with energy and tenderness. While the two side screens above the stage showed a film of an MCB couple as Francesca and Paolo in slow-motion reverie, on stage the four dancers moved in circular patterns and classical poses, which had the effect of embodying the passion the couple felt for each other, despite their cruel fate in the afterlife.
The Purgatorio that followed has a beautiful central tune, originally for oboe, singing out against a quiet, calm accompaniment as Dante and Virgil leave the savagery of Hell for the mountainous landscape of Purgatory. Cooper narrated less, and the Pierce supplied another evocative dance, again full of a lively spirit that contrasted dramatically with the awestruck mood of the music and the video imagery. The marvelous athleticism of these dancers was an advertisement for the robust enjoyment of life and provided a strong reminder of what is lost in the realms beyond the quotidian.
The Magnificat that closes the work is originally for women’s chorus, but here was most ably sung by the Miami Children’s Chorus, led by Timothy Sharp. Aleida has a brief line (originally written for a chorus member), but that was enough for her to stand in as Beatrice, Dante’s great love interest. Pierce’s dancers, moving much more formally, briefly involved her in some fifth-position arm work as they showed her off and the music built slowly to its conversation with the Almighty.
All of the participants here — narrator, filmmaker, pianists, singers and dancers — did their jobs impeccably, and that they were able to bring off such a complicated event was most impressive. But it could have been better; the chief impediment to that was Liszt’s score itself. It’s not one of his best pieces, so it needs tender loving care to come across well. But aside from that, an arrangement for two pianos as a stand-in for the orchestra means the musical focus is on the pianos instead of orchestral instruments.
Having two pianos often sink into the background, therefore, is a partial defeat of the purpose, and I think it could have been more effective with some orchestral instruments added. It would have been beautiful in that hall, for instance, to spotlight an oboist in the top tiers, playing the Purgatorio melody, and for the other two movements, some orchestral color to add weight to the otherworldly real estate then being toured: A brass quartet for the Inferno, say, and a string quartet underneath the Magnificat.
This would have been much more expensive in a concert that had to be costly as it was, but it would have been truer to the spirit of chamber music and it would have made the Liszt work better.
That doesn’t take away from the innovatory nature of this concert, or of the high level of performance excellence in several fields with which it was presented. As I’ve said in the past, the Mainly Mozart Festival has redefined what chamber music concerts are all about, and one looks forward to next season with admiration for what Radiushina and her team have done, and high hopes for what they’ll come up with next.