St. Stephen's Church: Jupiter Chamber Players Perform Rossini, Gatti, Tartini, Salieri and Mozart

Yesterday evening, I visited Christ and St. Stephen's Episcopal Church on West 69th Street to hear the Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players perform works by Rossini, Gatti, Tartini, Salieri and Mozart.  The lighthearted program, entitled The Italians & Mozart, made for an entertaining summer evening.

The program opened with Rossini's overture to La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie).  The overture is by far the most famous part of the opera, not only for its innovative use of snare drums, but also for its romantic history.  The story is that when the opera was being written in 1817, its producer was so concerned about having the score completed on time that he actually locked the composer alone in a room and refused to release him until the overture was done.  Rossini is said to have thrown pages out the room's window one by one as he finished them.  Copyists were waiting below and hastened to write out the orchestral parts so that the opera would indeed be ready for its La Scala premiere.  How much truth is contained in this account is open to conjecture.  At any rate, there were no snare drums in evidence yesterday.  The performance was based on a transcription by Franz Alexander Pössinger for string quartet and double bass.  For all its small size, the combination did very well in capturing the electric excitement that characterizes Rossini's overtures.

The work that followed was also arranged for string quartet and double bass.  That was Giuseppe Tartini's Sinfonie in A Major, C. 538, a traditional Baroque four-movement piece that seemed very restrained in comparison to the composer's most famous work, the Devil's Trill Sonata, the latter a showpiece for any violinist's skill.  While Tartini possessed  fabulous ability as a virtuoso, he is also important as the violinist who helped shape the modern method of bowing the instrument 

If Luigi Gatti is remembered at all today, it is primarily through his connection with Mozart.  Gatti's appointment as kapellmeister in Salzburg was a hard blow to Mozart's father Leopold who felt he better deserved the position and its attendant advantages.  Later, after Mozart's death, Gatti rendered assistance to his sister Nannerl who was seeking any lost works by Mozart that might still remain in Salzburg.  In this matter, though, Gatti is said to have been as much a hindrance as a help.  The Trio for Clarinet, Viola and Cello played yesterday showed Gatti to have been a competent if not particularly distinguished composer.  It was a pleasant but not memorable work.

Thanks almost entirely to Peter Shaffer's 1979 play Amadeus, Antonio Salieri has become the most maligned composer in the history of music.  In popular imagination he is even today considered the assassin of Mozart.  This is pure fiction, however, and lacks any basis in fact.  Though the two may have been artistic rivals (and Mozart does accuse Salieri, along with Da Ponte, of "trickery" in his letters to his father), they respected one another's work even if they did occasionally vie with one another for commissions at the Viennese court.  In fact, Salieri was a prolific composer of opera as well as a teacher of both Beethoven and Schubert and did nothing to deserve the bad reputation with which posterity has since burdened him.  The Concertino da camera (1777) for flute and string quartet played at the Jupiter recital was very well constructed even if it did not rise to the level of genius.

Mozart's Eine kleine nachtmusik, which closed yesterday's program, demonstrated perfectly why Mozart's works are still performed everywhere today while those of his contemporaries have by and large fallen into obscurity.  Though so often played that it has perhaps become over familiar, it still stood out so clearly from from the company of the other pieces that even a non-musician could not fail to appreciate the genius of its composition.  Beyond that, the work, described by Mozart biographer Hildesheimer as "an occasional piece from a light but happy pen," was thoroughly enjoyable and seemed to capture the very essence of the beautiful summer evening outside.