Conductor Hans Graf ends SSO stint with delightful programme pitting Salieri against Mozart

Hans Graf Farewell Series: Mozart And Salieri

Singapore Symphony Orchestra
Victoria Concert
May 22, 7.30pm

Whatever libels writers Alexander Pushkin and Peter Shaffer may have committed against Italian composer Antonio Salieri in pinning Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s apocryphal poisoning on him, they were indisputably right about one thing: the yawning chasm between Salieri’s genteel mediocrity and the dazzling genius of his victim.

That unfortunate but unavoidable gap underlay the first half of this hugely enjoyable and creatively programmed concert, which set up the least balanced of grudge matches by placing Salieri’s competent, anodyne C major keyboard concerto against Mozart’s K. 449, an absolute miracle of a work whose modest 20 minutes contain more surprises per bar than concertos thrice its length.

As Pushkin and Shaffer recognised, there is much dramatic material to be mined in this abyss between the plodding and the blessed.

Salieri’s self-pitying opening monologue in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mozart And Salieri, which provided this concert’s delightful second half, lays out the essential dilemma: How should a hard-working artist feel if, having devoted a lifetime to his or her art and risen to heights impressive enough to fool most patrons but irretrievably middling in the absolute, one was then confronted with genius incarnate in a feckless manchild?

The superb Russian bass Mikhail Svetlov, in powerful voice as a dishevelled, disillusioned Salieri, movingly conveyed this toxic compound of envy and despair, his male midlife crisis accentuated by his untucked shirt and the gold chain around his neck.

The weight of his moral predicament was brilliantly offset by tenor Boris Stepanov’s pleasingly annoying Mozart, a golden-voiced savant of similarly dubious dress sense, who contrived the most implausible of dramatic ironies by unwittingly accompanying his own poisoning (and Salieri’s simultaneous descent into guilt) with the opening bars of his own Requiem.

Under conductor Hans Graf’s assured direction, the orchestra – and, in the extract from the Requiem, the choir concealed in the balcony – performed both concertos and Rimsky-Korsakov’s affectionate homage to their composers with aplomb, although there were a few moments of dodgy ensemble and a smattering of cracked horn notes.

Nonetheless, it was a treat to witness a semi-staged performance of such accomplishment. Graf and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO) play with real rapport, and while this was Graf’s last concert as SSO music director, one notes with pleasure that he will be returning for several concerts next season.

The concert also had the good fortune of featuring two immodestly gifted young pianists, Adrian Tang and Toby Tan, as soloists of impressive poise and maturity.

Tang drew the short straw with the Salieri, but he made the best of it with sparkling passagework, voicing of great clarity and some beautifully limpid phrasing that suggests extraordinary promise in more interesting repertoire.

Tan’s Mozart was a gem. The K. 449’s piano part is murderously tricky to play, but he handled the cruellest passages, like the finale’s scurrying staccato quavers, with marvellous elegance and control.

If anything, Tan was too well-behaved; one sometimes missed a bit of the work’s opera buffa character in passages such as the first movement’s chains of chortling off-beat trills or the sudden slip into C minor just before the cadenza. But the musicality of his playing represented an exceptional achievement for someone so young and presages great things to come.

There are clearly budding Mozarts in the Singapore classical music scene, and it is good to know that, unlike Salieri, audiences are wholeheartedly glad for it.