Mozart on my mind

Mozart will have quite a weekend in Milwaukee.

Ingrid Fliter will join the Milwaukee Symphony and music director Edo de Waart in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 Friday and Saturday.

Friday night, the Skylight Opera Theatre will open a long run of The Marriage of Figaro that shows every sign of being a highlight of the performing season.

The concerto and the opera are two of Mozart’s most popular works. They differ vastly in scale, but share and embody the same Enlightenment values. (Yes, music can have such values, even music without words.) In both pieces, Mozart celebrates the pointless, beautiful virtuosity of art for its own sake, depicts the raucous jollity of life and lends a meditative moment to ponder the value and meaning of it all.

The hilarious, door-slamming, disguise-ridden plot of the opera stops in its tracks for the Countess to sing Dove sono.

 

Ah! If at least my loyalty still loves in this pain, it may bring me some hope of changing that ungrateful heart, she sings, of her husband, the philandering Count. And from that moment, the opera is more than a mere amusement, although it is amusing to the end. It has moral weight, as measured by Enlightenment standards: We all have a part to play in this drama of life, and duplicity and indulgence disrupt and harm those around us. It is up to us to rein in our appetites for the benefit of all. The Countess knows this and practices it, and she ends the aria determined to make him see the light, and the music is so beautiful, dignified and concise that we love her for it.

The Piano Concerto No.23 is of course less explicit; Lorenzo da Ponte did not write words for it. But like Marriage, it is not heroic, though the first movement has its little sonata-form stress and adventure of leaving the home key and finding the way home again. Ultimately, the first movement is a tale of enormous energy tautly restrained by civility, which is exactly the lesson of Marriage of Figaro.

The concerto is poised and level-headed in a way that the Schumann Piano Concerto in A minor, which Fliter played with striking and fitting inventive flair with the MSO last April, is not. (The two concerti neatly illustrate the difference between Classicism and Romanticism.) Its tender second movement, if played simply, is innocent and not treacly, a sonic embodiment of the kind of passionate but pure love that the Countess would both give to the Count and receive from him. The ebullient  finale leaves us in a free and happy world.

I recall Ned Rorem, composer and sometime gadfly musical commentator, complaining about composers who defended ugly music as a legitimate response to the brutal and ugly modern world. His response was something like: “I assure you, the world was just as ugly in Mozart’s time.”

Certainly it was. He responded by crafting a musical model of the world as it ought to be. Who wouldn’t want to live there for a little while?

In addition to the Mozart Piano Concerto, this week’s MSO program includes the local premiere of both Esa-Peka Salonen’s Gambit and Henk de Vlieger’s “symphonic distillation” of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. Concert time is 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday (Jan. 29-30) at Marcus Center Uihlein Hall, 929 N. Water St. Tickets are $25-$93 at the MSO website, the orchestra’s ticket line (414-291-7605) and at the Marcus box office, 414-273-7206.