Storm und Drang, Vol. 3 – Works by Mozart, Schweitzer, Kozeluch, Paisiello and Haydn
The Mozartists/Ian Page
Signum Classics SIGCD759 71:39 mins
Ian Page’s programme notes, expert and informative as ever, explain the background to the Sturm und Drang (roughly, ‘Storm and Stress’) movement in late 18th-century German literature, which triggered a parallel trend in the music of the time. This latest release in The Mozartists’ ongoing series features three suitably minor-key orchestral works: alongside Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue, K546 are Leopold Kozeluch’s impressive Symphony in G minor and Haydn’s Symphony No. 44 (‘Trauer’, or ‘Mourning’). Interleaved with these are recitative-and-aria extracts from two operas of the time, Anton Schweitzer’s Alceste and Giovanni Paisiello’s Annibale in Torino (Hannibal in Turin).
The Mozartists’ full-on commitment to period-style performance can’t be argued with on documentary grounds. But its delivery here does make for an element of wall-to-wall relentlessness, which surely isn’t how it would have come across at the time of its creation, when an approach of this kind would have been a natural style. That said, the bomb-proof technical standard of the playing would surely have delighted Mozart. And winsome justice is done to the beautiful slow movements of Kozeluch’s and Haydn’s symphonies.
But the stand-out feature here is the sensational contribution of American soprano Emily Pogorelc, who is rapidly becoming a star on the European operatic scene. Her singing here has superb technical sureness, state-of-the-art command of the music’s wild emotional switchbacks, and firework-display virtuosity to match. While the Schweitzer extract amounts to little beyond expertly written melodrama, Pogorelc delivers it at full value. The far finer expressive range and sensibility of Paisiello’s idiom reveals her as an artist of much soul as well as brilliance. Malcolm Hayes