BY
~LEXANDER
•
VARTY
ARTS
Sometimes you just have to confess. And while I doubt I'm alone in this, I have a terrible little secret: although I admire Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, although I can recognize his glittering brilliance and his importance in the development of classical music, I don't much like his tunes. But with Louis Lortie's help, I just might come around. Lortie is the internationally renowned Canadianborn pianist and conductor who has made Mozart's music one of his many specialties. He's recorded all 27 of the Austrian master's piano concertos, so if anybody is equipped to assist me with my Mozart problem, he's the one. And when I reach him at home in Berlin, he's surprisingly willing to help. "Like any kind of music, it's a matter of how you feel connected to it," he says. "Maybe you have a problem with that time in history? It would be interesting to see if you like the paintings of the same time, or the other art forms: Maybe you just don't like the rococo period in general. It would be interesting to see if you like the architecture of that time. It's all a matter of connecting, historically." Hmmm. Being an instinctive modernist, I'm no.t really fond of the rococo. So Lortie suggests . that one way to listen to Mozart is to view him as a subtle agent of change, working within some very codrfied structures. "Mozart was maybe the last great genius to be really a prisoner of his time," the former child prodigy' asserts. "After Beethoven, of course, musicians took a lot ofliberty. But what's interesting with Mozart is that although he always seems to be following the rules of what's happening around him, he's actually very subversive-but in a very, very subdued way. "That's the whole thing about Mozart: his outside image is so polished; he seems to be such a good boy. But once you start to look under the carpet, it's very interesting to see all there is the-re. It's the same with the literature, as well. If you look at Mozart's letters, even if you don't
Virtuoso pianist LOllis Lortie.says the composer concealed a raunchy defiance of t1te rutes behind a veneer of conformity
like the weather: it can be very, very cloudyand suddenly the most care for the music, they're very interesting to incredible ray of sunshine will pierce through. "On the surface," he continues, "it doesn't seem to read. He was a very devout Catholic-you didn't have any choice about that-and there was so be so revolutionary, the way [Franz Joseph] Haydn much tragedy and so many deaths in every- would be, for example. Haydn would point with his ·body's family that you had to take life seriously. finger and say, 'Oh, look what I'm doing here: I'm But- despite his very religious background he doing a much longer phrase than you thought,' or .would start making all sorts of jokes about sex, 'I'm changing keys here.' With Mozart, the veneer or about going to the toilet and things like that. is very, very, very classical and very conformist. It's It's weird! It's a strange mix." really like somebody who's going to a nice dinner Lortie cites Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20 in and behaves very well at the table, but maybe he's D minor-which he'll play with the CBC Radio putting his hands on the girls' knees under the table Orchestra in an afternoon concert at the Chan and nobody notices. That kind of thing.'' Centre for the Performing Arts on Sunday (March For Lortie, this covert sensuality is one of Mo16)-as an example of the composer's ability to zart's main attractions. And in concert it's a qualichart the extremes of both levity and tragedy. "In · ty he amplifies by serving as both piano soloist and that piece it's quite incredible to see how he can conductor-as did Wolfgang Amadeus himself. switch on and off, especially in the last move"This is rather new,'' he says, "but people are ment, from the minor to the major. It's a little bit starting to understand that it doesn't make sense
to play Mozart with a conductor and a .pianist. You don't need a ·relay in between, like you do in the big Romantic concertos, .where you have a big orchestra massed against the soloist and somebody must be there to integrate everything. In .this case, I think the idea of the conversation, ofthe piano in dialogue with the strings and the winds, is much more in keeping with the spirit ofwhat we think Mozart was doing." _ The .i,mportant thing, Lortie adds, is to avoid playing by rote-and, somewhat surprisingly, he compares his goal to the act of improvisation, even though Mozart's interpreters always work from a written score. "We dream that we also can be improvisers,'' he says. "That's our aim, our goal: to make it fresh, as if it was improvised. But for that you really need to feel that you're inside the music, that you know how it's worked out." Now, that's the kind of Mozart this jazz baby might enjoy. ~