There’s a chill in the Scottish air at this time of year, and the summer’s heatwaves are a distant memory as the September nights start to bite. Thank goodness for East Lothian’s Lammermuir Festival to provide some musical consolation as autumn begins to take hold.
American pianist Jeremy Denk has been a regular guest at the festival since his debut there in 2021, and this year he took centre stage with a series of six Mozart Piano Concertos (Nos. 9, 14, 17, 20, 24 & 25) over three concerts, alongside Gateshead’s Royal Northern Sinfonia, who are coming close to being the festival’s house orchestra, so regularly do they appear there.
Nobody is complaining about either of those things, though. One of the lovely elements of this Mozart series was the way Denk, directing from the keyboard, conspired with the RNS’s leader, Maria Włoszczowska, directing from the violin, to create a beautifully balanced sound that seemed to levitate in the vaulted splendour of Haddington’s St Mary’s Church, the resonant acoustic creating a halo around the sound and slotting piano and orchestra into one another marvellously.
The orchestra played with modern instruments using period inflections, with clipped phrasing, discreet vibrato and snatched grace notes that made the music bounce. There was never a hint of period austerity: in fact, moments like the slow movement of Piano Concerto No. 14 sounded gloriously soft, with an opulence to the sound that balanced the transparency, while the central movement of the early “Jeunehomme” Concerto, No. 9, turned into an intense, tragic aria with aching string tone that only occasionally sounded a touch too forceful. The strings played No. 17 with graceful refinement while maintaining light-hearted ease, and achieved strange profundity in the slow movement with its operatic winds that seemed to be doing nothing other than having a casual chat with the piano.
Choosing concertos from across Mozart’s career gave the composer a chance to show a different face every time, something the players relished with playing of vibrant colour. No. 9 brimmed with positivity and bounce, with Denk’s muscular pianism coming as close as the teenage Mozart ever would to being an Alpha Male. Yet his cadenzas were surprisingly light on their feet, and he slowed up to create a sense of delicate grandeur for the finale’s Menuet. He might have enjoyed himself a little too much in the fizzing finale, with rather too many muddied runs and headlong rushes, but he conjured up marvellous delicacy in the slow movement of No. 14, and the concluding variation of that concerto’s final positively danced off the page.
The more mature concertos, however, stepped things up by an order of magnitude. No. 20 had lithe, flexible string playing that sounded like a caged animal, with crackling energy balanced by legato playing, particularly in the heavenly second movement, which was played with disarming sweetness and was even – shock, horror – taken at a relatively slow tempo, a bewilderingly rare thing these days. Denk’s piano had a tendency to run ahead in some of the most dramatic passages, but he generated an intense head of steam in the cadenzas, while in the magisterial textures of No. 25 he seemed by turns to spar or to dance with the orchestra. Finest of all, however, was No. 24, whose dark drama was made all the more intense by the string playing sounding so honeyed and beautiful.
In each concert, a pair of Mozart concertos was balanced by a 20th century complement, the pick of which was a mercurial performance of Janáček’s Mládí from five wind soloists of the RNS who played with bubbling energy, yet occasionally found bittersweet longing that could break your heart. Janáček’s puckish changes of mood were brought to wheezing, chortling life by the whole range of the sound from the top of the piccolo to the bottom of the bass clarinet, and the strings found a similar sense of kaleidoscopic variety in the changing moods of Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. They even managed to get beyond the chalky austerity of Stravinsky’s Concerto in D to find something strangely alluring, egged on by Włoszczowska’s energetic direction.
