ISO's Bologne and Mozart: Sparkle of programming leaves open questions of merit

Early-music specialist Jeannette Sorrell guest-conducts ISO. 

 "I am the darker brother," Langston Hughes advised and warned his white (and unwilling to acknowledge) fellow Americans. Classical music has recently moved to extend such acknowledgment to its darker brothers and sisters, and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra follows the trend this weekend in putting Joseph Bologne (1745-1799), a biracial, multitalented aristocrat often known better via his French knighthood as the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, shoulder-to-shoulder with a younger contemporary, Wolfgang Mozart. 

Hughes' poem, "I, Too," quickly brings in the compelled inferiority of his race through the imagery of having to "eat in the kitchen when company comes." Sometimes not feasting at the main table is posthumous as well: Hughes' poem implies that and the historical record can bear it out. The question remains as to how worthiness to take a better seat can be fairly judged, given the huge company of obscure composers who didn't face racial barriers to securing an immortal niche. 

Anthony McGill is featured this weekend in  concerto and aria accompaniment.

In Words on Music and remarks to Friday's concert audience, guest conductor Jeannette Sorrell made much of a briefly shared residence in Paris of the two composers in 1778. Little is known of what interaction they had during a brief acquaintance. Mozart was finding a path forward as a former child prodigy somewhat restive in his professional status in his native Salzburg. Bologne was famous for his compositions and violin playing; he also distinguished himself in fencing competitions.

Sorrell pointed to influence the older composer might have had on the young Austrian, who would hit his stride only after moving to Vienna in 1781. She had one of the guest soloists, clarinetist Anthony McGill, demonstrate a characteristic leap downward in short cadential phrases as an example. McGill's main responsibility in this program, which he discharged with virtuoso panache, was to play Derek Bermel's arrangement of a Bologne violin concerto. Scored in A major, the work calls for the solo instrument in A, a trifle longer than the more common B-flat clarinet [see photo at right]. (The original has been recorded by Rachel Barton Pine.)

Mozart's Overture to "The Marriage of Figaro" made a suitably ingratiating curtain-raiser, as the opening concert of "Mozart & The Chevalier" further displayed Sorrell's specialty in "period" orchestras. She's founder and artistic director of Apollo's Fire, a prolific stalwart in American early music based in Cleveland. Then it was the "darker brother"'s turn as Bologne came under consideration through an opera aria from "L'Amant anonyme," an opera whose overture was played by the ISO in 2021.

Soprano Sonya Headlam was soloist in "Enfin une foule importune...Amour, deviens-moi propice." She poured the character Leontine's  ambivalence about a new relationship well into the accompanied recitative, which impressed me more than the rapid aria that followed. The soloist put that across well too, but it is melodically undistinguished. 

After the concerto, McGill returned to the stage to join Headlam in a remarkable Mozart aria with the obbligato clarinet leading the accompaniment: "Parto, ma tu ben mio" from "La Clemenza di Tito," the opera seria Mozart wrote in his illness-burdened final year, 1791. Headlam's emotional projection was keen, sustained, and well-phrased, and McGill's playing was as supple and expressive as it had been in the Bologne concerto.

This is a good place to consider the matter of influence. The fact that Mozart was able to return to an obsolete form of opera and bring his genius to bear upon it confirms his lifelong susceptibility to other composers' work. It was immense, from childhood on, and Mozart often bragged in letters how good he was at imitation, especially in improvisational settings. The effect seems to have stopped short of plagiarism, though one scholar has tartly observed that the Austrian phenom was certainly good at covering his traces. 

In his 1995 biography "Mozart," Maynard Solomon mentions a host of composers who affected Mozart significantly, especially in his early years, and quotes contemporary testimony to that fact. I won't make much of the fact that Solomon never mentions Bologne, but it's proper to infer that the two composers' acquaintance in 1778 rubbed off on Mozart no more than the effects of many others, including Francois-Joseph Gossec, who was a crucial mentor to Bologne.

This is by way of trying to correct excessive, latter-day bracketing of the two composers, such as by the slapdash epithet for Bologne as "the black Mozart." I have not heard anything by Bologne in the same league as the Symphony No. 40 in G minor, of which Sorrell led an inspired performance after intermission. 

Hardly anyone shares the odd perspective of Glenn Gould that No. 40 opens with a murmur of mere throat-clearing and doesn't get any better, except for the near-atonal, eight-measure outburst at the start of the finale's development. The work has forever stood at the peak of regard for Mozart as a symphonist, a sublime example of grace under pressure (a phrase Hemingway formulated as the definition of courage). 

A degree of detachment in the string playing, including some diminution of vibrato, is a practice Sorrell  explicitly linked to her work with the ISO this week. The default setting of conventional orchestral sound — triumphant in the 19th century — prioritizes silky, sustained, dominant, robust strings; in contrast, a "period" emphasis puts those sections into a more collegial framework. 

Thus, the way Mozart advanced in ensemble writing from the serenade style he exhibited in Salzburg, such that suppleness and a colorful palette for the winds could inflect the more complex symphonic form, got brilliant display Friday. The wind choir in the ISO has never sounded better than it does nowadays. That contingent deserved the "solo" bow Sorrell signaled it to take at the end. 

Confinement to the sociocultural kitchen is of course a sign of prejudice and unfair marginalization. But in bringing forward marginalized figures who deserve some exposure, let's not turn felicity of programming and marketing  (which "Mozart & the Chevalier" undoubtedly is) into a distortion of values. Joseph Bologne can still be celebrated, and he was close to his era's major tumult, the French Revolution. That's just one of the respects in which his cultural standing deserves to be remembered. 

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