{"id":1710,"date":"2026-10-22T09:06:17","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T16:06:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=1710"},"modified":"2026-10-22T09:08:07","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T16:08:07","slug":"mozart-and-more-mozart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/mozart-and-more-mozart\/","title":{"rendered":"Mozart and More Mozart"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What could be nicer? Two nights in a row listening to Mozart at Carnegie Hall<\/a>\u2014first an intimate Zankel concert featuring Emmanuel Ax and The Knights, suitably adored by the assembled aficionados; next a solo recital by Yunchan Lim in the larger Stern Hall, packed to the full with thousands of clamoring fans. Both were terrific evenings, and if I mildly preferred the first, that probably says more about my chamber-music leanings than about the quality of either performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Knights is a small orchestra\u2014there looked to be only about twenty musicians onstage, though the number could have been more\u2014based in Brooklyn and founded in 2007 by two brothers, Colin and Eric Jacobsen. Colin (who also helped found the quartet group Brooklyn Rider) is still the concertmaster of The Knights, and Eric is still the conductor: they always give each other a hug before the start of each concert, at least in the performances I\u2019ve seen. Often this group combines modern and older music in a wildly adventurous fashion, but this time they decided to confine themselves entirely to Mozart\u2019s period, and it was a smart choice. After a brief opening \u201cOverture\u201d by an eighteenth-century composer I\u2019d never heard of, Joseph Bologne (it was apparently a Carnegie Hall premiere, for reasons that are not hard to discern: it sounded like every other pleasant-background piece composed in that plentiful century), they launched into two of Mozart\u2019s most charming piano concertos, both with Ax as the soloist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought we had reached the pinnacle of delight when he played the first one, Piano Concerto No. 17 in G Major. But then, in the second half, when he launched into No. 25 in C Major, I realized there were further peaks to scale. Both were beautifully done, with the orchestra backing him up perfectly: quietly on the strings when they needed to foreground the keyboard, responsively on the flute, oboe, and bassoon when other voices intertwined with the piano\u2019s notes. It\u2019s no surprise that Manny Ax is beloved by everyone in the music world: you can see both his generosity and his modesty when he plays with a group like this. And that in turn infused our sense of the music, so that we seemed to be welcomed into the enterprise as if we too were part of what was taking place onstage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Listening to Yunchan Lim in the elegantly appointed but vast Stern Hall is an entirely different order of experience. You out there in the audience are a witness, not a participant, and what you are witnessing is a very private person communing directly with his composer and his piano. This pianist and these piano sonatas are an ideal match: he knows how to bring out their varieties of dynamic range, their combination of colors, their difficult finger-work that somehow ends up sounding flowing and easy. In the first of multiple Carnegie concerts he’ll be giving this year that all feature Mozart\u2019s piano sonatas, he chose to start with the C Major (K. 279), the D Major (K. 284), the F Major (K. 332), and the A Minor (K. 310), plus a brief \u201cFantasy in D Minor\u201d (K. 397) that opened the second half of the show. As I expected to, I liked the A Minor sonata best (I always feel Mozart\u2019s beaming attitude benefits from a bit of minor-key melancholy). But more than my memory of the individual pieces, I retain a retrospective sense of an unmitigatedly pleasurable evening. It was like having electrodes wired into my brain that kept transmitting signals of calm, peace, relaxation, enjoyment\u2026all in short supply in the rest of our life these days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What could be nicer? Two nights in a row listening to Mozart at Carnegie Hall\u2014first an intimate Zankel concert featuring Emmanuel Ax and The Knights, suitably adored by the assembled aficionados; next a solo recital by Yunchan Lim in the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[64,959,960,961,211,838],"class_list":["post-1710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-carnegie-hall","tag-emmanuel-ax","tag-mozart-piano-concertos","tag-mozart-piano-sonatas","tag-the-knights","tag-yunchan-lim"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1710"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1712,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1710\/revisions\/1712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}