Mozart Sinfonia Concertante – Talich Father and Son

Fathers and sons in Mozart tend to invite lazy metaphor, and I will try to resist. But there is something unavoidably touching in hearing Jan Talich the elder trade phrases with Jan Talich the younger across the Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat, K. 364, a work that itself stages a kind of filial rivalry between violin and viola, neither instrument quite willing to defer to the other. Mozart wrote it in Salzburg in 1779, not long after the death of his mother in Paris, and there are those who hear the slow movement — that long-breathed Andante in C minor — as a kind of private mourning smuggled into a public genre. I am not sure I buy the biographical reading whole. But something somber does live in that movement, and the Talichs find it without melodrama.

The son’s tone is silvery, unforced, a little cool at the top. No scratch, no strain. The father’s viola is another matter entirely: darker-grained, burred at the edges, carrying that particular Czech violistic gravity you hear in Milan Škampa’s old recordings, or for that matter in Josef Suk’s playing of the violin part decades ago with this same director. Which is the real point of interest here. Kurt Redel, well into his seventies when this Prague session took place in 1992, had already set down a classic version of the Sinfonia Concertante with the Czech Philharmonic thirty years earlier, Suk and Škampa the soloists — a disc I still own, still treasure, the old Supraphon pressing with its faded pastoral sleeve. To bring him back to the same city, the same essential musical lineage, one generation on, feels less like a marketing gambit than an act of historical continuity, whether or not anyone at Calliope intended it that way.

Redel’s conducting has not lost its tact. He shapes the orchestral tuttis with a firm hand but lets them breathe, attentive to Mozart’s wind writing, the oboes and horns given real color. The Talich Chamber Orchestra plays with the tight ensemble you’d expect of a group built around a quartet’s discipline, strings lean rather than plush, textures clarified. Some will want a richer, more Romantic wash underneath the soloists — the old Barenboim-Zukerman version on EMI leans that way, sumptuous, unhurried — but I find Redel’s leaner approach lets the dialogue between the two solo lines emerge with unusual clarity. You hear every exchange, every little one-upmanship.

Balance between the soloists is exemplary; nobody muscles anybody else out of the frame. The slow movement is where father and son truly meet, trading suspensions with an ache that never curdles into sentimentality, the viola’s entrances given just enough space to register their weight before the violin answers. It’s beautifully controlled duet playing, the kind that comes from years of chamber-music habit rather than rehearsal-room compromise. The finale, a Presto that ought to skip along with high spirits, felt to me slightly buttoned-up — correct, well-tuned, but missing that last ounce of comic swagger that, say, Perlman and Zukerman brought to their old Sony recording, all elbows and grins. A small complaint. The intonation in the viola’s upper register occasionally turns thin under pressure, though I suspect this is more an issue of a particular instrument’s projection than of craft.

The two duos for violin and viola, K. 423 and K. 424, composed in 1783 to help out Michael Haydn, who owed six such duos to the Archbishop of Salzburg and had fallen behind, receive performances of real wit and unforced sympathy. These are unpretentious, intimate pieces, written fast and without fuss, and the Talichs treat them exactly that way: no over-projection, no attempt to inflate chamber music into something it isn’t. The G major has real charm in its rondo; the B-flat’s variations are shaped with an easy, conversational give-and-take that only close family playing, or its equivalent in long friendship, can really produce.

Calliope’s documentation, as usual, tells you almost nothing you need to know, and the disc’s convoluted publishing history — recorded in 1992, reissued now, turning up on the bargain Phaia imprint elsewhere in the catalog — suggests a label more interested in keeping the tapes circulating than in serving the listener with proper notes. No matter. The performances speak for themselves, and speak well. Not a first choice above the classic accounts, but a genuinely satisfying, quietly moving one, and a fitting late chapter for Redel, who seems to have come home.