MOZART'S MUSICAL JEST

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIV, Issue 20966, 19 February 1938, Page 16

MOZART'S MUSICAL JEST

LARGE AUDIENCE PLEASED SCORE FULL OF WIT The sedate audience at a recent concert of the New Friends of Music n the New York Town Hall was convulsed with laughter by Mozart's "Musikalischer Spass,” which most humorous of compositions terminated a programme containing further the | same composer’s string quartet in B flat and the Schumann violin sonata | in A minor, states a writer in the New York Times. I In the "Musikalischer Spass" <Musi- , cal Jest>. also known as "The Village Musicians" and the "Peasant Symphony.” Mozart created a masterpiece of pungent satire in which he heaped ridicule on the composers of his day who wrote symphonies that had nothing to impart. The seore. so teeming with wit that its rarity on ensemble programme s hard to understand, was once owned by Franz Schubert, and must have given him many a chuckle. One of Mozart’s divertimenti scored for strings and horns, it was intended for orchestral performance. But. since it is never given in that form, it was a privilege to hear it presented as a sextet, with the Kolisch Quartet playing the four parts for strings and Domenico Caputo and John Barrows busied with the mirth-provoking music allotted the two horns.

The players entered into the spirit of the “symphony” with gusto and made every instance of Mozart’s fun count in a devastatingly funny reading of each of the four movements. The stolid repeated chords and stilted

rhythms of the main theme of the opening allegro, the purposely stupid development of that movement and the horn cacophonies at its close started the amusement the work aroused. Equally hilarious in effect were the false notes of the horn in the grandiose minuet and the exaggerated dynamics of the strings in the trio. But the climax of humour was furnished by Rudolph Kolisch’s excruciating rendition of the mad cadenza for first violin at the end of the mock-serious adagio. The early instance of polytonality, where each instrument was heard simultaneously in a different key, brought the finale to an uproarious termination.