Divertimento in D, K136 - Mozart
Violin Concerto No 3 - Mozart
Violin Concerto in A minor - Bach
Symphony No 39 - Mozart
The Orchestra of St Cec ilia's latest three-concert Mozart and Bach series got off to a good start at the National Concert Hall on Wednesday.
Mozart's early Divertimento in D is a piece which often sparks a sort of tricksy virtuoso display from modern chamber orchestras. Barry Douglas took a much gentler approach, encouraging some of the silkiest string tone I've yet heard from the OSC while still capturing the music's essential vitality and charm.
Catherine Leonard was the musicianly if not always entirely comfortable-sounding soloist in the concertos by Mozart and Bach. Mozart is one of the most elusive of composers, his apparent directness and simplicity masking deeper levels which resist many of the devices of expressive probing that musicians like to employ.
Leonard's playing on this occasion danced more freely and persuasively than it sang. And in Bach's A minor Concerto she essayed a lightness that, while agreeable in itself, didn't quite deliver on the sharpness of contour or articulation that it seemed to promise.
The orchestral support in the two concertos showed signs of raggedness, and in the closing symphony, the first and most neglected of Mozart's final three, Douglas seemed to be striving for a sustained intensity that his forces couldn't quite muster.
He's not the most controlled-looking of conductors, with gestures of an emphatic jerkiness that's not always easy to connect with the sounds that result in the playing. In the symphony, the music-making was at its most consistently rewarding in the Minuet, which was graced by some strikingly expressive and penetrating clarinet-playing. Elsewhere, there were frequent problems with rhythmic control and clarity of balance.
This was Douglas's first encounter with the OSC, and it will be interesting to see how his work with them develops in the remaining concerts of the series over the next two weeks.
