1775 – A Retrospective: Ian Page & The Mozartists on terrific form in a deep dive into the sound-world of Mozart’s 1775

Benda: Medea – Alexandra Lowe, The Mozartists, Ian Page at Cadogan Hall (Photo: Martin Kendrick)

1775 – A Retrospective: Ordonez, Hasse, Mozart, Benda: Medea, Haydn: Symphony No. 67; Alexandra Lowe, Alessandro Fisher, The Mozartists, Ian Page; Cadogan Hall
Reviewed 29 January 2025

As Mozart 250 reaches 1775, we explore music Mozart wrote for other people’s operas, a Haydn symphony that tantalised with a sense of a hidden story and Benda’s highly influential and unfairly neglected melodrama for an engrossing evening

Ian Page and The Mozartists have reached 1775 in their Mozart 250 project. Later this year, the group will be performing Mozart’s La finta giardiniera (written for Munich in 1775), but on 29 January 2025 at the Cadogan Hall, they were joined by tenor Alessandro Fisher and soprano Alexandra Lowe for music from 1775. There were three arias Mozart wrote for insertion into other people’s operas, pieces that it is always tricky to programme, plus an aria from Haydn’s oratorio Il ritorno di Tobia and an aria by Hasse (born 57 years before Mozart), as well as symphonies by Ordonez and Haydn. Perhaps the most unusual work in the programme, however, was a scene from Benda’s melodrama Medea, its form of spoken drama with music rather preventing the work having the sort of performances it deserves.

Alessandro Fisher, The Mozartists, Ian Page at Cadogan Hall (Photo: Martin Kendrick)

We began with the Symphony in G minor by Karl von Ordonez (1734-1786), the Viennese-born illegitimate son of lower nobility who seems to have taken his mother’s Spanish surname. His working life was devoted to his job at the Lower Austrian Regional Court so his composing was part-time, but he wrote two operas, plenty of church music, 27 string quartets and 73 symphonies. His G minor symphony was scored for strings and oboes. The first movement was engagingly lyrical with dramatic moments and a sense of the melody coming in waves. The slow middle movement’s gracious melody included the violas getting a rare moment in the spotlight, and the final movement was vivid and brisk with great onward energy.

This was followed by Hasse’s ‘Se tu non vedi’ from La Danza, the cantata written during his retirement in Venice; Hasse’s last major stage work was Piramo et Tisbe from 1768. La Danza is the usual pastoral story, of lovers Tirsi and Nice. Here were heard Nice’s first aria, ‘If you do not see all of my heart’, sung by Alexandra Lowe. The music plunged straight in, full of classical grace yet with plenty of ornament in the vocal line, all sing engagingly by Lowe with a vibrant lyric voice.

Next followed a trio of arias that Mozart wrote for a touring Italian opera buffa company in Salzburg (he wrote five in total). Alessandro Fisher sang Si mostra la sorte and Con ossequio, con rispetto. Si mostra la sorte, ‘Fate shows itself’ was written for an unknown opera, it featured horns and flutes which contributed significantly to the aria’s striking sound world. It was a graceful, ingratiating piece with a vividly contrasting middle section. Con ossequio, con rispetto, ‘With deference and respect’ was written for Piccini’s L’astratto and was busily athletic and characterful. Both were elegantly and winningly sung by Fisher. Then Lowe sang Voi avete un cor fedele, ‘You have a faithful heart’ for Galuppi’s Le nozze di Dorina setting a text by Galuppi’s librettist, the Venetian playwright Goldoni. It was warmly engaging with a more pointed middle section.

We finished the first half with an aria from Haydn’s oratorio Il ritorno di Tobia. This was written for the musicians’ benevolent society who mounted regular charitable performances. The oratorio ran along strict lines, lots of recitative punctuated by arias in the manner of Metastasian opera seria. Haydn’s oratorio is one of his least known works. Alessandro Fisher sang Quando mi dona un cenno, ‘When your sweet lips give me a sign’, and it proved to be a rather lovely piece, with graceful strings and oboes and Lowe’s grace and elegance to match, with a darker minor middle section. All in all, rather sophisticated stuff.

After the interval came a scene from one of those pieces that ought to be better known. Benda’s melodramas were highly influential pieces and when Mozart heard one later in the 1770s he was profoundly struck and though he never used the form full, melodrama threads its way through his music. Benda started writing melodramas because he was Kapellmeister in Saxe-Gotha and with the death of the Duchess the opera troupe was disbanded. The advent of the Seyler theatrical troupe gave him the opportunity and he would ultimately write four melodramas.

Medea was actually a substantial piece, the whole lasts around 45 minutes [see my review of Benda’s Medea recorded in its rarely performed revised version] and whilst there are other characters, the piece is essentially a deep dive into Medea’s mind. Here we heard the scene when she psychs herself up to kill her children, the instrumental sinfonia that takes place whilst that happens (off stage) and then the subsequent scene. Alexandra Lowe performed Ian Page’s English translation of the text and declaimed magnificently. The piece is constructed like a piece of accompanied recitative, the spoken phrases punctuated by music. Only at the very end, with the repeated cries of ‘Let him scream’ did the text combine with significant musical gestures.

Acting at the time would not have been naturalistic in the way we consider, and Lowe gave the piece a magnificent grandeur and sense of the over the top. Benda’s music had a restless energy to it at first, whilst the sinfonia in the middle was quite considered, and after when Medea returns from her dark deed, it was sparer, heightening the text. The result was compelling and striking and made me want to here the full piece, or perhaps Ariadne auf Naxos which was considered Benda’s finest melodrama. The recording I mentioned above has the disadvantage of rather using radio play type techniques for the spoken passages, whereas what Lowe and Page demonstrated magnificently was that the work is designed for dramatic declamation which then combined with Benda’s music in a striking fashion.

We ended with Haydn’s Symphony No. 67 in F major. The piece has no nickname and we have no context for it, yet it is full of striking detail and humour, so that you can’t help feel that there is a story there somewhere. The opening Presto was a playful, dancing movement though drama developed and it was full of lively and engrossing orchestral detail. The graceful slow movement was quiet and concentrated from the strings, though Haydn had the wind periodically joining and causing striking contrast and disturbance. Eventually, things thinned down to just two solo violins, with no bass line. A remarkable gesture that made you wonder where things were going, except the opening material returned, yet Haydn had one final joke, the strings playing their final gesture col legno, with the wood of the bow so the notes were barely there. The robust minuet was a fine contrast to this, but in the trio, things thinned down again to two violins, the second creating a musette-like drone. The vivid energy of the final movement was contrasted with a middle section where again the trio section thinned two just two violins and cello, before the vivid energy of the opening returned. All in all, remarkable stuff, played winningly by Page and his team.

This concert did exactly what we need for such retrospectives, pairing some of Mozart’s more difficult to programme works with items both known and well-known and giving such hidden gems as Haydn’s oratorio and Benda’s melodrama space to be appreciated.