Mozart: Violin Concertos - Tognetti, Australian Chamber Orchestra (2010)

Experiencing the Australian Chamber Orchestra and their leader Richard Tognetti in concert has been described in The Times as 'like taking a swig of a vitamin drink'. This is the first of two discs on BIS of Mozart's violin concertos. Contributing to this is the fact that the strings (both soloist and orchestra) play on gut strings, while the wind players perform on replicas of instruments from Mozart's time.

Tognetti has been the leader and artistic director of the ACO for more than 20 years.

Composer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Performer: Richard Tognetti, Christopher Moore
Conductor: Richard Tognetti
Orchestra/Ensemble: Australian Chamber Orchestra

Reviews: Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra perform three of Mozart’s string concertos, according to his notes, on instruments strung in gut at A = 430 (Tognetti himself plays the 1743 Carrodus Guarneri del Gesù), with wind instruments that he believes resemble those of Mozart’s own time. Outside of that, he states, everything is conjecture, although he suggests that Mozart’s development as a composer of opera influenced the style of his successive violin concertos.


In the first movement of the Third Concerto, Tognetti and the orchestra play the churning passages with a bubbling enthusiasm that also infects the middle section’s solo. The recorded sound, from February 2009 in Sydney’s Australian Chamber Orchestra studio, hardly lacks its own kind of bounce, although it’s characterized by minimum reverberation. Tognetti plays cadenzas that make use of thematic material but hardly seem better-integrated stylistically into the rest of the movement than Sam Franko’s popular and mellifluous ones had been. In the slow movement, Tognetti makes the appogiaturas short rather than long, but they fit well with the timbres of the instruments and with the piquant conception he seems to have formed of the movement in general—although he waxes more lyrical as the movement progresses. In the finale, as in the other movements, he plays with crisp energy, enhanced by personal touches, especially bright in the rondo’s episodic sections. His surely isn’t the ruddy, raw-boned approach of Isaac Stern, the elegant one of Jascha Heifetz, or, on period instruments, the intensely individual one of Andrew Manze (Harmonia Mundi USA HMU 907385, Fanfare 29:5), but it’s unmistakably his own.


The Fifth Concerto, which I’ve heard grow heavy in live performances as well as in recordings, sounds, in its first movement, surprisingly refreshing; and although Tognetti eschews the idea of simply scrubbing time’s accumulated layers off these works, he’s done something like that—so successfully, in fact, that the helium lightness resulting from sharp articulation and slender, silvery tone belies the performances’ low pitch. The cadenza for the first movement includes a pedal and a short passage of accompanying pizzicatos; but, perhaps excusing these novelties, Tognetti emphasizes in his note Mozart’s inventiveness. The slow movement proceeds at a rapid—though not rushed—tempo that never allows it to sound indulgently affected. In the finale, Tognetti plays the outer sections with especially pointed articulation.


In the Sinfonia Concertante, Tognetti plays off his bright-sounding Guarneri against the resonant-sounding viola of the Australian Christopher Moore. Already in the first movement’s opening tutti, Tognetti introduces individual touches, with a crescendo that builds with almost Beethovenian power; later, tuttis intrude almost obstreperously—or, perhaps as Tognetti might suggest, operatically. If his tempo in the slow movement never lags, the soloists’ dialogue seems to possess a profundity that no more sedate tempo could deepen. As they did the first movement, the duo and orchestra enhance the finale with lively personal touches, many of them rhythmic; but, as throughout the collection, they’ve obviously thought very carefully about the effect of slight accents and dynamic nuances.


If these performances seem a bit eccentric—even a bit disconcertingly so—from minute to minute, in long stretches they make a deep impression. Buoyed by bouncing and clearly defined bass lines, they’re so fresh that, even though Tognetti’s stylistic predilections may be clear from the opening movement’s first measures, nothing ever seems predictable, yet nobody, except for a brief inserted cadenza here and there, hints at improvisation. The question’s unavoidable: How will such readings survive repeated hearings? Ask yourself some related questions: How well do recorded jazz improvisations hold up? How well do staler, or at least more hidebound, interpretations hold up? Having posed these questions, I nevertheless don’t recommend that anyone wait for answers before acquiring these deft, imaginative readings, in clear and lively recorded sound.