Mozart: Symphony No. 29 and Serenades – Hofmann

There’s a particular pleasure in hearing Mozart before he learned to hide his effort, before the seams of counterpoint and formal argument got papered over by that uncanny fluency we call, lazily, “Mozartean.” The pieces on this disc catch him mid-apprenticeship, still visibly building the workshop he would later occupy like a man born to it.

Start with the Kassation in G major, K63. Thirteen years old, and already he understood something about charm that most composers never learn at any age: charm is a discipline, not an accident. The little marches, the minuets that trip along without a wasted gesture, this is music built for an evening’s entertainment in a Salzburg garden, torches probably guttering, servants passing wine, nobody expecting to be moved to tears. Hans-Peter Hofmann and the European Union Chamber Orchestra understand this. Nothing is oversold. The phrasing has an unforced buoyancy, textures are transparent, you can hear individual desks of strings breathing together, a lovely thing in music this unpretentious.

The Divertimento in D major, K251, from 1776, is another matter entirely, though it wears its greater sophistication lightly. This is the piece Mozart apparently wrote for his sister Nannerl’s name day, and there’s an oboe part, added later, most likely for a friend, that lifts the whole conception onto another plane of color. By now the twenty-year-old composer has absorbed enough Haydn, enough Michael Haydn, enough of his own accumulating experience, to make “entertainment music” sound like there’s no such demeaning category at all. The interpretation here is genuinely fine: ensemble balance beautifully judged between winds and strings, tempi unforced, the concluding “Marcia alla francese” delivered with just the right hint of tongue-in-cheek pomp. If you want one track to convince a skeptic that divertimenti aren’t merely decorative wallpaper, try the Adagio.

Then the Symphony No. 29 in A major, K201. Here, I confess, my enthusiasm cools.

This symphony is one of the great early miracles, up there in most listeners’ affections with the G minor, K183, written the same year, 1774, when Mozart was eighteen. The two works are practically siblings, one stormy and Sturm und Drang, the other luminous and inward, and both display a structural mastery, real symphonic thinking, not just a string of pretty tunes, that genuinely startles when you remember the composer’s age. The opening movement in particular asks for something almost vocal in its lyricism: that rising octave leap needs to sing, to hover, before the music can develop its argument. Hofmann’s tempo is brisk, arguably too brisk. The notes arrive on schedule and correctly accented, but the tenderness, that quality of held breath before a phrase resolves, never quite blooms. I found myself thinking of Bruno Walter’s old Columbia disc, unfashionably romantic by today’s period-conscious standards but somehow more alive to the music’s inner ache than this efficient, well-schooled reading. Karl Böhm, too, found more air in the phrasing, more space for the woodwinds to color a harmony rather than merely fill it.

Where Hofmann’s approach pays off is in the back half. The minuet has real rhythmic bite, you feel the accents land in the body, not just the ear, and the finale is genuinely exciting, the horns whooping away with a virtuosity that must have delighted, and possibly terrified, the Salzburg court hornists of 1774. There’s an infectious sense of momentum here that the first two movements could have used more of.

Sound quality throughout is clean, immediate, without artificial glow. You hear the hall, modestly sized, and the instruments within it, nothing smoothed over by studio varnish. Celia Pond’s notes are a genuine pleasure, informative without pedantry.

So: a disc of two-thirds real distinction, and one movement pair that undersells a masterpiece. Worth owning for the K251 alone, but keep your Böhm or your Marriner close by for the symphony.