PRSO brings double dose of Mozart to season farewell.
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
By PEGGY ANN BLISS
Special to The STAR
What better way to show love for one’s new bride recovering from an illness than to write a Mass for her? And how much better if she just happened to be one of Austria’s most celebrated sopranos?
Her husband, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), the uncontested musical heavyweight of his era, wrote “The Great Mass in C Minor” in 1782, when he was just 26 years old.
Its difficulty was created to prove to his exigent father that he had made a good choice.
This and another great masterpiece from the young genius’ final years will constitute the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra’s (PRSO) farewell to the current season this Saturday.
Musical Director Maximiano Valdés will conduct both the instrumental and choral parts of this religious masterpiece, which opens the program. He will close the program with an uplifting symphony, one of the world’s greatest, the C Major.
A Mass to prove a point
Mozart also hoped to bring his domineering father Leopold around to approving of his wife. He wrote impossibly difficult arias, which she handled with aplomb. A great performance staged in Mozart’s hometown left the old man unmoved. Mozart and Constanze moved on to other things. They never returned to Salzburg.
After Mozart’s strategy failed to persuade his father, the young couple’s absence from Vienna may have contributed to the death of their first child, whom they had left in care of a nurse. A new world of independence was opening to the couple. Mozart was free to pursue new goals, and he lost more children and loved greatly in the years that remained to him.
Comparable in greatness to the composer’s own “Requiem,” the religious work for orchestra and double chorus was unfinished, lacking an “Agnus Dei” and parts of the “Credo.”
For this reason, the work is considered a “torso,” or significant chunk of a major work.
Although Mozart lived almost a decade longer, he never returned to the work, spending his remaining time in an amazing spurt of energy which produced his three greatest symphonies, several operas and chamber works. The length of Masses was being pruned down by churches at the time, and secular works for small ensembles, especially with Mozart’s adored clarinet, new on the musical scene, occupied more and more of the composer’s time.
The Mass as art
“The Great Mass,” featuring the Coral Filharmonica de Puerto Rico, a double choir of 80 voices singing eight parts of a traditional Latin text, was prepared by Associate Conductor Francisco Luis Ortiz, who has a master’s degree from Westminster Choir College at Princeton.
The work opens the Mozart evening and lasts about an hour.
It is unique in that it combines the austere patterns of Baroque counterpoint with the lush expressive drama of the opera.
The opening solo is sung by Soprano No. 1, Natalia Santaliz, who recently made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. She will also be the sole singer in the dramatized cantata “The Trojan Women,” a highlight of the upcoming Casals Festival.
Santaliz’s “Et incarnatus est” (And He Was Made Flesh) is another highlight to listen for, with its intricate coloratura and expressive range.
The “Qui Tollis” (Who Taketh Away … the Sins of the World) shows a heavy influence of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Sung by the double chorus with a deep sense of sorrow “created by downward sliding harmonies and an inexorable rhythm. Another part that shows the influence of Mozart’s predecessors, Bach and Georg Friedrich Handel, is the “Cum Sancto Spirito” (With Thy Holy Spirit), a massive double fugue that closes the “Gloria.” Another standout, to be sung by Soprano No. 2, Camelia Isabel, is “Laudamos te” (We Praise Thee) a florid virtuoso solo for second soprano that sounds more like opera than a Mass.
Isabel, who recently sang this Mass with the Buffalo Symphony with Valdés on the podium, provides the contrast of her rich colored voice to balance the more lyric soprano of Santaliz.
“El Incarnatus Est,” another masterpiece, is an exquisite eight-minute soprano aria resembling a flute or oboe.
This unfinished work puts unusual emphasis on the female singers, leaving tenor Jehu Otero Mateo and baritone Martín Alicea Díaz to handle the ensemble work.
‘Jupiter,’ a Mozart masterpiece
At 30 minutes, Mozart’s “Symphony No. 41” in C Major (“Jupiter”) was one of his longest and (due to the key) one of his most cheerful. The C Major piece will act as a triumphant counterpoint to the “C Minor Mass” of the first part of the program.
The fourth and final movement of the symphony, a technical marvel, is the one to wait for, leaving a triumphant memory of beauty and excellence as the last measures of this PRSO season.
Entitled “Maximo Movimiento” (Maximum Movement), the theme is an apparent pun on the name of the Chilean conductor completing his 18th season as musical director.
Although the Musical Arts Corporation is looking for a successor for Valdés, the board has extended his contract indefinitely until a replacement is found.
The PRSO’s closing concert will begin Saturday at 7 p.m. in the Pablo Casals Symphony Hall at Luis A. Ferré Performing Arts Center in Santurce.