Symphony Explores Mozart’s Emotional Terrain

Mozart is taking Pasadena by gentle storm this season, as the Pasadena Symphony punctuates its expanded eight-concert season with three all-Mozart evenings. The timing is good, coming years after the deluge occasioned by the 1991 bicentennial of the composer’s death. Mozartean preoccupation seems like a healthy obsession again, something entirely good for the soul.

Saturday at the Pasadena Civic, in the second Mozart program, the balance revolved around the Piano Concerto No. 21, K. 467, in C, that beloved staple of the repertory that refuses to be undermined by overexposure. Here, it also refused to be undermined by small detail problems in an otherwise strong, stirring performance led by Jorge Mester.

The strings sounded momentarily intonationally challenged in the first statement of the seductively pining theme of the Andante, the commercial hook of the work. The fine pianist Howard Shelley, otherwise a model of clarity and vision in his performance, issued a few bits of odd, almost jazzy phrasing, reportedly due to an uncooperative piano with sticking keys (an occupational hazard for pianists unable to bring their own tool to the job).

An emotional gulf separates the lighthearted Serenata notturna, K. 239 in D, played with a proper chamberlike buoyancy by the orchestra and featuring concertmaster Peter McHugh as an assured protagonist, and the Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, in the concert’s second half. It takes no great interpretive leap to hear in this late work waves of angst surging beneath the genteel surface. Mester et al mustered up the right degrees of brooding and affirmation in this harbinger of Romanticism, whose refined structures impress more than much of the Romantic bombast to come.