Mozart’s bash has it all: food, fun, music

Everyone loves a good party. And Allegro Baroque and Beyond celebrated Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 250th birthday Friday with music and cake.

The fun, food and music of this concert party made for a long evening but provided many tasty morsels both musical and culinary.

Allegro’s co-director David Dutton rightly called Mozart “the greatest natural musical talent the world has ever known” and introduced The Met audience to some Mozart rarities for various instrumental duets, along with some unusual arrangements of samples from Mozart’s most famous opera.

Actors Ethan and Sandy Dexter impersonated Mozart and his wife Constanza engaging in some “Amadeus”-like banter.

Dutton, playing English horn, and French hornist Margaret Wilds opened with “Der Spiegel,” a musical trick by Mozart which consists of a single page of music.

The players face each other with the page spread out between them. Each starts with what appears to him or her to be the top of the page and plays to the bottom. The result is what is known technically as a “canon in reverse inversion.”

It was a compositional tour-de-force that sounded thoroughly normal, if not exactly like the inspired Mozart we admire from his great masterpieces.

Dutton and Wilds also played another Mozart rarity, Five Duos, originally written for two French horns. The five short movements were alternately dance-y and songful and a pleasure to hear.

Slightly more serious was the Rondo in G major originally for violin and viola, which were played Friday on oboe and viola with Dutton being joined by violist Melvin Butler. The contrast between the timbres of the two instruments gave the work an added tension, but the original made matching phrases easier since violinists can breathe easier than oboists.

For me, the evening’s most impressive work and most impressive playing came as Dutton and Butler were joined by pianist Jody Graves for Charles Martin Loeffler’s Two Rhapsodies, inspired by two macabre poems by the French Symbolist poet Maurice Rollinat.

The poems were read effectively in Philip Hale’s English translation by the actor Craig Rickett. Despite Rollinat’s bizarre imagery, Loeffler’s music, akin to Debussy’s, evoked rippling water, mysterious night skies, and the haunting sound of the bagpipe “crying” as the poet says, “in a way unmatched by the grief of a stag at bay, the sound of sobbing oars or sighing willows.”

The Rhapsodies were beautifully played and showed Loeffler to be a marvelously imaginative and very underrated composer. The cake served at intermission, a product of the bakers at the Culinary Arts Department of Spokane Community College, received excellent reviews from those who managed to get a slice. This reviewer was not one of the lucky ones.

Following intermission, Dutton, Wilds and Graves delivered an elegant and romantic performance of Carl Reinecke’s Trio for Oboe, Horn and Piano. Reinecke lived from the time of Beethoven until the times of Debussy (and Loeffler) but was almost completely unaffected by “advanced” music of his time whether it be by Brahms, Tchaikovsky or Wagner.

The better-known composer whose work Reinecke’s suggests is Robert Schumann. But Friday, players made the most of Reinecke’s echoing melodic motifs and the unsignaled lane changes of his harmony. The composer had a fine grasp of the contrasting sound of the three instruments, and the players matched each other admirably.

The program’s finale was an unusual arrangement of seven excerpts from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” Dutton has discovered a solo piano arrangement of the whole opera by the 19th-century composer Georges Bizet and two numbers for two unnamed treble instruments, possibly by Mozart himself.

Dutton added parts for oboe, viola and horn to Bizet’s arrangement. The result was good, clean, musical fun. I regret that the length of the program and newspaper deadline combined to make me exit even before Don Giovanni had a chance to seduce Zerlina. The result was probably musically seductive, though unsuccessful the Don’s seductions were in that opera.