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New Trinity Baroque’s Zesty Mozart
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
New Trinity Baroque. Saturday at St. Bartolomew’s Episcopal Church, Atlanta.
They answer to a higher power, they say, never personal motivation.
Thus politicians insist they’re legislating for the people, preachers claim direct access to God’s will, and classical musicians declare fidelity to the composer’s intentions. It’s always done with unblinking earnestness; if we support their cause, we tend to believe them.
But a music group that interprets a master like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart can’t help but draw on its own performance style and resources, which obscure the wishes and expectations — if they’re known with any precision — of a composer who was born 250 years ago.
Instead, New Trinity Baroque’s season opening all-Mozart concert brought to mind a correlated adage: If you’ve got a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
As the name indicates, New Trinity specializes in baroque music. In recent seasons, conductor-organist Predrag Gosta and the period-instrument band have delivered bracing, often illuminating readings from the century or two before Mozart was born.
For them, Mozart comes late in the game. They can’t help but interpret his music with an ear for what preceded him — in direct contrast with, say, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s romanticized hammer, where Mozart is one of the starting points, influencing all who came after. Despite the mission statement, “fidelity to the composer” is a moving target.
Refreshingly, the sounds of New Trinity’s Mozart didn’t anticipate Beethoven but found links with music Mozart knew, from Corelli and Handel to Rameau and C.P.E. Bach.
The concert opened and closed with the sort of super-popular Mozartiana that everyone can hum along with. “Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” a little evening serenade, got a balanced, zesty performance.
As in the Divertimentos nos. 1 and 3 — also known as Salzburg symphonies — Mozart’s tunefulness flows like water from a spring, inexhaustible and pure, yet a tiny twitch in the harmony can suggest a change in mood or undercurrent of tenderness, melancholy, even despair.
Gosta and his players were alert to these nuances. Although some of the slow movements briefly lost a sense of tension — sounding rhythmically unsteady — in the fast movements they touched on the exuberance of a life that, seemingly, could never end.
That was another benefit of New Trinity’s Mozart. Where modern orchestras present music by the tragic genius who died too young — his romantic potential still in the bud — the early music context catches him in the full flower of life, a vital presence in the here and now.
Between the serenade and divertimentos, New Trinity offered three of Mozart’s youthful church sonatas (nos. 2, 4 and 11), scored for a pair of violins and backed by cello, bass and organ. Carrie Krause and Garry Clarke were the robust-toned violinists, playing with power and wit, at one point improvising on “Happy Birthday” — and getting the audience to sing — to honor the composer whose music offers endless possibilities for reinterpretation.
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