The Washington Post 3/21/06: The 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birthday continues with no end, thank goodness, in immediate sight.  And on Sunday at the Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall, Washington’s superb Eclipse Chamber Orchestra added some intriguing historical perspective to the ongoing celebration.


Sylvia AlimenaIn a program titled “1756: It Was A Very Good Year”, ECO music director Sylvia Alimena explored a simple idea: take the music being written at the time of Mozart’s birth and compare it with one of his fully mature works.  Those three decades, of course, marked an almost violent transition from the Baroque, through the Mannheim School of Johann Stamitz, to the first glimpses of Romantic sensibility that can be seen in Mozart’s own remarkable Symphony  No. 40 in g minor (K. 550) written in 1788.  

Alimena set off on this journey with George Frideric Handel’s Overture to Judas Maccabeus – a bit dusty and musty after two and a half centuries, but brought to life in a clear and compelling reading by the ECO. That was followed by some pleasant musical wallpaper by Florian Leopold Gassmann (a mostly-forgotten 18th Century composer of opera buffa) and the more engaging Sinfonia Op. 3, No. 6 by Stamitz, a composer whose influence on symphonic form (and hence on Mozart) was immense.

Enjoyable music, deftly played. Yet the works paled to nothing beside Mozart’s great and tragic Symphony  #40, which made up the second half of the program.  For Alimena, it’s virtually a Romantic work, and she brought out its pathos in a beautiful, even electrifying interpretation -- a performance that only underscored how fresh and powerful Mozart continues to sound, while most of his contemporaries must settle for mere historical context.