Mostly Mozart in Tsfat

Last Thursday evening, we attended an utterly delightful concert at the Yigal Alon auditorium, right here in downtown Tsfat. The concert was part of a short festival entitled "Mostly Mozart", organized by Ada Peleg, a native of Haifa, who also conducted the orchestra. According to the blurb that she wrote (in Hebrew) in the program, this is intended to be the beginning of a year-round classical music program here whose highlight will be festivals like this that will draw top classical musicians from around the world.

I had bought us tickets in advance, and we had prime seats, in the 2nd row just left of the center.

The program consisted of three works. The small string orchestra (without any other instruments) started it off with Benjamin Britten's "Simple Symphony", a work I had not previously been familiar with. It's a delightful and varied piece for string orchestra, including one movement that is entirely pizzicato (meaning that the players pluck the strings rather than bowing them).

The rest of the concert was music by Mozart. For this, they added a few woodwinds and a couple of horns. The 2nd piece was a concerto for harp and flute, another work that I had not known of before. The solo harpist, יוליה סברדלוב, is Israeli, having immigrated here in 1991. She is the principal harpist of the Israeli Philharmonia. The flautist was גואוליאנג האן, principal flautist of the Symphony Orchestra of China, professor of music at the Academy for Music in Beijing, and a leading flautist in the world today. They were both superb, and of course Mozart's music was absolutely unbeatable, as well!

An intermission separated the two works by Mozart. The evening concluded with Mozart's well-known and incredibly fabulous 40th symphony, whose themes continued to bounce around in my mind all night and most of the next day. This is a work that I am very familiar with and have always loved, and the performance was dazzling! Ms. Peleg is an expert conductor, conveying her passion for the music to the orchestra and bringing the best out of them without excessive theatrics.

This concert served to remind me why I love Mozart's music so much. Mozart lived right in the middle of the era known in music history as the Classical period (the late 18th century). This was the Age of Enlightenment, and composers all strove for balance in their music. Many composers did this quite well, but most did it primarily through simplicity and symmetry, rather like designing a building whose left and right sides are mirror images of each other. No one can deny that it's balanced, but it's not terribly creative. Mozart "balance", on the other hand, is more like an acrobat ... doing a handstand .... on a unicycle ..... on a high wire ....... stretched between two skyscrapers! In other words, it's nothing short of amazing!