The
Australian Chamber Orchestra has made an impression worldwide with its concert appearances, featuring a group of energetic young players who stand up on-stage and bring a desirable physicality to performances of music from the Baroque to the 20th century. The orchestra includes some of Australia's most talented young players, and its efforts to transfer its sound to recordings have never been less than satisfying technically. Teamed here with violinist
Richard Tognetti in a group of concertos and concerto movements by
Mozart (another disc covers the remaining violin concertos and the Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola in E flat major, K. 364), the orchestra maintains its trademark crisp yet flexible articulations throughout. The performance reflects what some have called historically informed (as opposed to authentic) practice, with modern instruments strung with gut strings. This imparts a warmer tone, but the performance itself is anything but warm and diverges sharply from the usual approach to
Mozart's concertos and above all from the
David Oistrakh performances that many violinists still have in their heads. Sentiment is systematically drained out, and in its place is something else: a sort of exposure of the inner architecture of the music, with attention given to texture, layering, solo-tutti relationships, and the weighting of large-scale harmonic progressions. In many ways it works well. The march-like opening of the Violin Concerto No. 4 in D major, K. 218, lets the violin chisel out sharp responses to the horn-driven main theme, and in this type of movement you can almost hear
Mozart thinking out larger concerto architectures for the first time.
Tognetti gets the feel of the violin concertos as ambitious youthful works, and you could argue that most other violinists miss that in an effort to make them into full-fledged masterpieces. On the other hand, with revisionist interpretations you have to ask whether everything in the traditional model really needed revising, and here the slow movements fail to reflect an era in which tunefulness was king, was a counterpart to an aesthetic of painting that prizes sweetness and light. The rocking tonic-dominant alternations into which the K. 218 slow movement falls after its opening material are almost tossed off. Still, there are those who like a dry approach, and there's a good deal of freshness here from some forward-looking musicians. The group gets absolutely top-notch Swedish engineering support; the details of texture within the small group are awesomely transparent.