Mozart on the Road is the title of a pair of programmes that the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is touring this spring. They feature works that Mozart composed while on his travels around Europe, as well as some of the music by his contemporaries that he might have heard en route. But the first of them, which featured the fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout, was confined to works composed in Austria, away from his native Salzburg, in just a single year: 1784.
The concert began with a chamber work, one of the most singular in the repertoire, the Quintet for piano and winds, K452, which was first performed in Vienna in the spring of that year. The nimble playing of the OAE’s woodwind principals was a delight, though it’s a pity that the orchestra doesn’t follow the example of a number of other European period bands in giving details of the historical provenance of the instruments played by its members. Here, even information about the make of the fortepiano that Bezuidenhout played (perhaps a modern copy?) was lacking. It was a delicately toned instrument, silvery in the upper register, with a bit of reediness in the bass, though that reticence did mean that balance was sometimes a problem in the quintet; with the wind seated to the front of the piano, Bezuidenhout’s neat, crisp keyboard figuration was sometimes obscured.
Curiously, however, there were no such problems in the piano concerto, the G major, K453. It was a performance of relaxed give-and-take, with Bezuidenhout economical in his directions to the orchestra; if there are any darker currents to explore in this generally genial work, any temptation to uncover them was resisted. He conducted the Linz symphony, No 36 in C major, K425, from the keyboard, too, adding discreet reinforcement to some of the bass lines and an occasional flurry of ornamentation elsewhere. But in general the OAE was allowed a pretty free rein, and its playing was exemplary.
• Repeated at The Anvil, Basingstoke, on 13 April
