Mozart live – nourishing the invisible

Orchestra Wellington Concertmaster Amalia Hall – stylishly crisp and elegant Mozart.

Photo credit: Scottie

When Orchestra Wellington announced six live concerts of Mozart’s music under the direction of its charismatic young concertmaster Amalia Hall, I wasn’t the only music-hungry concert-goer to pounce. Three repeated programmes over three weekends, ‘koha’ entry but booking required, sold out within days. The Orchestra’s agility was admirable – the events were listed online just hours after the New Zealand government announced that gatherings of up to a hundred people were permitted.

I was part of a very happy and intimate audience at St Andrew-on-the-Terrace for the first programme at the beginning of June. We beamed at each other, we hand-sanitized, donated cheerfully and settled back into what felt like real life again. Even the RNZ Concert team, there to record, looked pleased to be back in their rightful place.

The series is called “Amalia and friends” and the players are members of Orchestra Wellington. The small orchestra of about thirty musicians, appropriate for Mozart’s music sounded fine in the warm and responsive acoustic of the church.

Hall led from her violin, standing in the middle of the players for the opening Concerto, Mozart’s 5th and last. Her reading of the work was stylishly crisp and elegant and she moved effortlessly between the tutti sections and her solo role. In the central Adagio the playing was expressive and graceful with an exquisite solo mini-cadenza and in the third movement a forthright Minuet alternated with lively foot-stomping “Turkish” sections.  Perhaps the Orchestra was not always as light-footed as their director in Mozart’s nowhere-to-hide musical textures but the performance had unflagging momentum.  

Mozart’s ‘Paris’ Symphony was composed in the City of Lights in 1778 for the Concert Spirituel series, one of the earliest public concert series in history, designed in the Age of Enlightenment to fill a gap during the Easter fortnight. For this Hall sat with the first violins on a little podium to lead a slighter larger ensemble, complete with two trumpets perched in the pulpit.  The engaging performance began with rhythmic drive in the Allegro assai, slowed for a lovely, warm central Andante and then raced for the finish in a very rapid Allegro that compensated with cohesive and positive energy for occasional ragged moments.

And then it was over. An hour of divine music, enthusiastic applause from the audience and out we went to a rather bleak Wellington afternoon. But something more profound had happened and again I wasn’t the only one lifted by the event, my first live concert for nearly three months.

Live music matters to us in several ways. There’s a visceral level, the physical pleasure of being there, hearing and feeling the music as it is made and experiencing the electricity between musicians and audience. There’s an emotional level, this time the joyous gathering for a shared experience but also the very many emotions music allows us to feel as we listen. Tears ran down more than one cheek in that church. And there’s a third level.

The morning after the concert I watched a virtual session from the 2020 Auckland Writers Festival. English author Peter Stanford talked about his recent book, Angels, and I was captured by his suggestion that human beings seek a “metaphysical, invisible dimension” in our lives that some believe is angelic. And writer Elizabeth Knox, herself creator of a famous angel, responded to a question about what runs through all of her books by speaking of “a yearning for the sense of marvellous”. Perhaps these eloquent writers were talking about what I had felt the afternoon before. The live music experience has not only a visceral and an emotional impact ­– it brings a marvellous other dimension. Many of us do not participate in institutional religion, but music itself can seem essential to our spiritual well-being. It nourishes that something invisible – we might call it our soul.

Orchestra Wellington will present two further Mozart programmes in four Wellington concerts in June. Additional tickets have been released for these with the removal of gathering restrictions and can be booked here.  

Read my 2018 interview with Amalia Hall here.