January 7, 2017 For the seventh of his themed midseason festivals, San Antonio Symphony music director Sebastian Lang-Lessing has turned to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The festival opened on Jan. 6 in the Tobin Center with Mozart’s brief Ave verum corpus and the Symphony No. 40 in G minor flanking Gabriel Fauré’s peculiar setting of the Requiem Mass, with the Mastersingers chorus and members of the Children’s Chorus of San Antonio. (All but the last of the festival concert programs place Mozart’s music in context with composers he influenced.)  Why Mozart? Why now? To answer the second first: Mozart ain’t easy. His orchestral music requires a particular kind of sound — transparent, refined, relaxed, meticulously balanced — and a light, agile playing style. Until the San Antonio Symphony moved into the Tobin Center’s H-E-B Performance Hall in 2014, the orchestra had never payed in an acoustical environment that allowed the development of a true Mozart sound. Mr. Lang-Lessing figured that, after two seasons of seasoning in the Tobin, it was time for Mozart to get his due. The results in the G minor symphony were not consistently what they should have been, but they came pretty close.  Why Mozart? What accounts for Mozart’s unsurpassed stature in European art music? The answer is connected to another question: Why pair Mozart with Fauré, who was not a classicist but a Romantic with Modernist tendencies? Present-day audiences might think of Mozart as the ultimate classicist, purveyor of all’s-right-with-the-world grace, formal elegance and rectitude, his music an antidote to the ravages of modernity. But if that were the reason for Mozart’s importance, his place could be filled more aptly by dozens of 18th-century non-entities who produced reams of forgettable music according to the “rules” of classical harmony. In fact there were never any rules of classical harmony, only statistical regularities. Mozart differed from most of his contemporaries in the boldness and assurance with which he expanded the usable harmonic space. The harmonic regularities weren't confining walls for Mozart, but doors and windows. Thus, for example, the astonishing passage that begins the development section of the G minor symphony’s last movement — starting out like the opening theme, it immediately flies off into harmonic neverland, coming within a hair’s breadth of a Schoenbergian 12-tone row, and breaks up the flow with a series of jerking leaps. In the performance, Mr. Lang-Lessing gave this passage a pointed gruffness, pounding home the last two notes with delicious verve.   Fauré, too, was a harmonic adventurer, and it was his capacity to push beyond the practice of his time and place (late 19th century France) without abandoning them that links him to Mozart.  Nothing about Fauré’s Requiem is standard. Fauré’s text eliminates most of the frightful Dies irae, occasion for the high drama in most Requiem settings, and the work closes with In paradisum, which is from the Order of Burial rather than the traditional funeral liturgy. The musical emphasis throughout is on consolation and acceptance.  The unusual orchestration conveys a feeling of calm restraint by giving the middle strings — violas and cellos — greater prominence than the violins, which have relatively little to do and are not even divided between firsts and seconds. (Accordingly, in this performance, the violas and cellos were seated at the front of the stage, ahead of the violins.) The requiem elicited one of Mr. Lang-Lessing’s finest performances to date. He led his forces with a wonderful suppleness that kept the generally stately lines always pushing forward. The Mastersingers, prepared by the indispensable John Silantien, were in top form, singing with clear diction and reliable precision, and maintaining a substantial sound even at pianissimo in both the Fauré Requiem and Mozart’s Ave verum corpus. The Children’s Chorus, prepared by Joseph Causby, was outstanding. Baritone soloist Morgan Smith, remembered for his superb performances in Brahms’s A German Requiem and Detlev Glanert’s expansion of Brahms's Four Serious Songs in 2011, once again impressed with his urgent sense of the text and the bright halo around his voice. Soprano Deanna Breiwick was technically secure but not very involving in the "Pie Jesu.”  The orchestra sounded lithe and polished through most of the G minor symphony, though the first movement sometimes wanted more precision. Mr. Lang-Lessing won high marks with his punchy rhythms in the menuetto, his quick pace in the finale and numerous smart details. On occasion, however, his tendency to favor the low strings darkened Mozart’s harmonic palette.  The festival continues Jan. 13 and 14 with violinist-conductor Kolja Blacher leading the orchestra in the Mendeslssohn Violin Concerto in E minor and Mozart’s Symphonies Nos. 36 and 38. Mike Greenberg 

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Portrait of Mozart by his friend Joseph Lange

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Why Mozart? 

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San Antonio Symphony, Lang-Lessing