Andrew Meacham, Tampa Bay Times, 5th November 2016
“The main attraction, Symphony No. 41, by Mozart, was thrilling in a different way…the music changes just at the moment you think you know where it is going.
It opens in a C-major key, a grand declaration, then seems to retract that promise in the next few bars — an extraordinary move in 1788, music director and conductor Michael Francis noted at a preconcert lecture. With each movement, the symphony adds elements, increasing complexity. The orchestra rallied to the task from all corners, with particularly lovely sequences by the strings. This symphony demonstrates as well as anything by Bach the mathematical component in musical genius. If you doubt that, just try to wrap your mind around what the “Jupiter” symphony does, with as many as five musical themes in the finale…
The concert began with Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony in C…the symphony opens with an aura of new beginnings, with creatures piping up from various corners of a musical swamp. The metric imbalances and dissonant harmonies that mark Stravinsky’s work soon emerge. A contrapuntal chaos takes over, even in the slower second movement…
While the innovative legacies of all three composers featured creates one theme, the personal crises of Mozart and Stravinsky point out another. In his lecture, Francis noted that neither of the composers’ works express grief so much as deliver a means of transcending it.
‘What I find so touching about the combination of Stravinsky and Mozart is the fact that art — in this case, the composition of music — helped them through their trial, helped them through their terrible pain,” he said. “And not necessarily as a cathartic process to write pain onto the page, but as a guiding light out of the tunnel.'”
