Neglected gems by Mozart’s mentors add appeal to MOB program

Jane Glover’s exceptional gifts as a Mozart interpreter have been an article of faith at Music of the Baroque ever since her arrival as music director in 2002. In fact, scarcely a season has gone by when she hasn’t delved ever deeper into this bounteous and self-renewing body of works.

For her April concerts with a chamber-sized version of the MOB Orchestra, she widened her musical lens to pair a Mozart symphony and piano concerto with unjustly neglected symphonies by two of the composer’s mentors whose influence on his music can be felt in ways great and small.

The splendid results, heard Monday night at the Harris Theater, not only shed new light on Mozart’s inexhaustible genius but also called to mind the astonishing amount of worthy music that languishes, largely unheard, just beyond the masterpieces of the Classical canon.

The teenaged Mozart met Czech composer Josef Myslivecek and German composer Johann Adolph Hasse during his travels to Italy in the 1770s. Both figures enjoyed great success in Italy where their operas held the boards for decades before falling out of fashion. So close was their friendship that Myslivecek’s name turns up 40 times in Mozart’s letters. It remained so, at least on a musical level, after Mozart’s father Leopold broke off relations with Myslivecek over an operatic commission the latter failed to deliver.

Clearly Myslivecek’s works offered Mozart a fount of fresh ideas for his own music. The Czech composer’s Symphony in F Major, heard Monday, is a real discovery. The score abounds in rhythmic energy, freshly minted melodies and harmonic surprises—one could easily have mistaken it for one of Wolfgang Amadeus’ early symphonies.

Glover enforced welcome transparency of texture and judicious balance of paired oboes and horns against the strings. If the rest of that composer’s 50-odd symphonies are this good, by all means let’s hear more.

Hasse could easily have been mistaken for Mozart’s grandfather when the two met in Vienna. Mozart was said to have greatly admired Hasse’s music.

The latter’s brief Symphony in G minor (Op. 5, no. 6), scored for strings and continuo, may be more conventional than the Myslivecek work but it impressed as a well-made and enjoyable creation, a welcome local corollary to Haymarket Opera’s 2023 performances of Hasse’s superior Marc’Antonio e Cleopatra. The MOB musicians tightened the tensions in the symphony’s driving rhythms and scale-wise ascents.

Then it was on to the Mozartean meat and potatoes of the program, consisting of the Piano Concerto No. 13 in C (K.415) and “Paris” Symphony (No. 31 in D, K.297), neither of which suffers from overexposure in our concert halls.

It’s worth noting that both Glover and her British colleague Imogen Cooper, the poised and fluent soloist in the concerto, were dubbed Dame Commanders of the Order of the British Empire in the 2021 New Year’s Honors.

Dame Imogen, making an overdue return to MOB (she was last heard here in 2017), was closely attuned to all that is special about this music—its abundant charm and well-mannered grace, sparkle and wit. Together with Glover’s sensitive accompaniment, the pianist’s rounded tone, limpid trills and finely wrought phrasing warmed the classical contours, particularly the aria-like cantabile of the central Andante. Here Cooper really lingered over lyrical detail, but, given the pristine beauty of the music, who could blame her for doing so?

The ”Paris” Symphony also brought out the stylish best in Glover and her instrumental forces, here enlarged to pairs of woodwinds and horns, trumpet and timpani along with the string choir. The result was a hefty but always clear sound which the conductor balanced and urged forward steadily, with admirable control, dynamic contrasts finely drawn. Eschewing her baton, she made the Andante central movement the beating heart of the performance, an extended, heartfelt arioso. The Allegro finale capped everything off brilliantly.