The Madison Symphony Orchestra rang in the new year with a concert weekend featuring pianist Joyce Yang and two giants of the orchestral composition world: Mozart and Mahler. Read reviews from the concert weekend, hear what the audience had to say, and view pictures below!
Madison Symphony’s ‘A Perfect Pair’ balances Mahler and Mozart
Matt Ambrosio, Special to the Cap Times
Maestro John DeMain programmed two mammoth works of the Western classical canon — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 24 featuring Joyce Yang, and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony no. 5 — for this weekend’s Madison Symphony Orchestra’s concert at Overture Hall, “A Perfect Pair.”
The two works do pair well. Both juxtapose and balance diametrically opposed registers such as joy and sorrow, elegance and crudeness, calm and frenzy. And due to their respective ways of teasing expectations and elaborately developing motivic material, both works reward engaged listening.
Moreover, both works fall on the darker end of their composers’ emotive spectrums. Mozart’s concerto is stormy and brooding and is full of internal strain, a departure from his contemporaneous comedic operas. Mahler’s symphony, which borrows some material from his “Kindertotenlieder” (“Songs on the Death of Children”), is heavy and mournful, though it does have a happy ending.
But even more connects these two. Mahler, known primarily as a conductor during his life, was a celebrated performer of Mozart’s works, including several of his operas. Legend has it that on his death bed, Mahler’s final two words were “Mozart, Mozart.”
Read the full review on The Cap Times’ website
Hear what the audience had to say…
