Mehta, Bruckner and Mozart with Yuja Wang in Firenze

Zubin Mehta, conductor and Yuja Wang, pianist

with Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

at Opera di Firenze, Firenze, Italy, 2015 December 19^th

Program:

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Concerto per pianoforte e orchestra in mi bemolle magg
. K 271 Jeunehomme

(soloist Yuja Wang)

Anton Bruckner
Sinfonia n. 9 in re minore

Zubin Mehta, (2007)

FIRENZE/ITALY: The great Austrian composer Anton Bruckner completed eight symphonies, on which he returned several times and for which therefore multiples versions exist. Besides Bruckner’s catalogue contains two symphonies before the First, not very known and generally rarely performed. 

On the contrary Bruckner left unfinished Symphony No. 9, although it is not clear if for unavoidable reasons (the symphony was written in 1894 and musician’s health condition was already precarious, death will occur in 1896) or for a certain Bruckner’s reluctance to write a fourth time of a work that he thought so perfectly “finished” with the first three moviments
. Maybe something similar, therefore, to the reasons for non-completion by Franz Schubert of his Symphony No. 8

. It also seems that Brucker recommended to have his Te Deum performed as the final movement of his unfinished last Symphony.

In this Florentine concert Indian conductor Zubin Mehta concludes Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony with its third movement, and overall we have not at all the idea of “incompletion” because the whole work is quite exciting and above all the last movement is extraordinarily intense as Mehta’s interpretation.

In fact the conductor excites the audience in a real emotional crescendo from the first to the third part of this Symphony, quite careful to extoll its powerful structure and instrumental refinements, wonderfully supported by the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in authentic great shape. Strings’ colour was always beautiful, brasses were impeccable, exciting the woodwinds and in general all the instrumental first parts of the magnificent florentine orchestra.

Yuja Wang

In the first half of the concert young chinese pianist Yuja Wang interpreted one of Mozart’s most beautiful difficult and important concerts, Concerto K 271 known also as “Jeunehomme”
. Her interpretation is not surely among the most exciting or the deepest that we have listened, in fact she often limites to a fairly superficial and with few ideas reading, also in agreement with Mehta’s collaboration that doesn’t go much beyond formal correctness without particular emotional tension
. The young pianist, very elegant as usual, also played an encore by Schubert-Liszt.

At the end of Bruckner’s symphony the Florentine audience that filled out the House gave a real triumph to Mehta and the orchestra.