The Jerusalem Street Orchestra (conductor: Ido Shpitalnik) performs Mozart at the 2020 Jerusalem Rooftop Festival

Photo:Yael Ilan

With very few live concerts taking place over recent months, August 24th 2020 was a festive evening for Jerusalemites. Offering three quite different open-air concert programs, tickets were quick to sell out for the Jerusalem Music Centre’s Rooftop Festival (August 24-26). In fact, the “Mozart on the Roof” program (August 24th) proved so attractive that there ended up being two performances of it on the same evening. Not actually a roof, the concert venue was a large terrace above the Music Centre of Jerusalem’s picturesque Yemin Moshe quarter.  Arriving just before sunset, concert-goers were invited to enjoy a glass of wine as they took their seats in the balmy Jerusalem summer evening breeze. The view over Mt. Zion was spectacular, with the play of light on the Old City’s buildings giving way to a sky awash with shades of pink, mauve and azure, then to become a rich indigo blue with a skimpy moon by the time the music began. General director of the Jerusalem Music Centre, Gadi Abbadi welcomed the audience, followed by a few words from Ruth Diskin (Jerusalem Foundation) and Eyal Ezri (Jerusalem Municipality), representing organizations supporting the project.

 

The program featured three works of W.A.Mozart, performed by the Jerusalem Street Orchestra under its conductor Ido Shpitalnik and with flautist Rotem Braten as soloist. Founded in 2013, the Jerusalem Street Orchestra, a chamber orchestra comprising gifted young graduates of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, frequently performs in open-air public spaces, presenting concerts combining classical music with orchestral arrangements of popular music. Shpitalnik’s aim is to make music accessible to new audiences, to enrich the public scene with high-quality culture and to provide a stage for Jerusalem’s own young musicians. Growing up in Jerusalem, Ido Shpitalnik played the piano from a young age, going on to serve in the IDF’s outstanding musicians’ unit. He holds an M.A. in orchestral conducting from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. 

 

Mozart was sixteen when he wrote the Divertimento in D Major K. 136 in Salzburg in the winter of 1772, following two extended sojourns in Italy. Indeed, the fast-slow-fast movement plan of this congenial work reflects the manner of the Italian sinfonia. The composer probably wrote it for one of the musical evenings held in the homes of Salzburg's leading residents, to serve as background music for conversation, dining, or other diversions; at these events, Mozart was known to have played on both keyboard and violin. The young instrumentalists of the Street Orchestra performed the Divertimento with joie-de-vivre and elegance, their playing of the Andante (2nd) movement both appealing and of well-shaped phrasing, the spirited Presto finale punctuated with subtle moments of Mozartian whimsy. The work, delightfully entertaining but hardly trivial, showed the players taking on board the virtuosic demands that Mozart’s string writing poses to orchestral players.

 

While in Mannheim, Mozart was approached by the physician and amateur musician Ferdinand Dejean with a request to compose a set of works with prominent solo flute parts. Mozart was unhappy at the demands of producing so much material for an amateur player who, although paying the commission (not the full amount, as it turns out) was limited technically and the composer engaged in some borrowing. The K314 Flute Concerto (1778) is actually a reworking of an oboe concerto Mozart had written in 1877, but what emerged in the new version was a concerto whose writing is idiomatic to the flute. In fact, it remains one of the finest examples of galant music, with its virtuosic opening and closing movements embracing a noble and magical slow movement. In playing that was stylistically pleasing, crisp and tastefully contrasted, the Street Orchestra’s focus and well-consolidated orchestral sound were remarkable. With consummate ease, musicality and precision, Israeli flautist Rotem Braten, currently residing in Basel, Switzerland, attentively wove the work’s flute lines in, out and around the orchestral weave, to the enjoyment of all present. But it was in her playing of each of the cadenzas (by J.Donjon, Yossi Arnheim and R. Tillmetz) that the artist had listeners at the edge of their seats as she presented each motif and its development with a fresh sense of discovery and spellbinding suspense. Hearing this work leaves one confused to think that, in a letter to his father on September 14th 1778, Mozart wrote: " You know that I become quite powerless whenever I am obliged to write for an instrument which I cannot bear ". Or might Mozart’s dislike of the flute simply be a piece of 18th century fake news?

 

The rooftop concert concluded with Mozart’s Symphony No.29 in A major, composed in 1774 when the composer was 18 years of age. Ido Shpitalnik led his players in a reading that displayed Mozart’s strategic balance between grace and energy together with the young composer’s skill in giving rise to much colour and expression using a very small orchestra comprising a few strings and pairs of oboes and horns. From the dignified opening Allegro Moderato movement, through the restrained but regal Andante, with its touches of colour added by the winds, the orchestra's playing of the effervescent, lilting Menuetto “breathed” nicely as it offered some comments of Mozartian humour, its Trio taking on a more serious countenance. As to the Allegro con spirito, bold of character in its flurry of scales and other energetic outbursts, the Jerusalem Street Orchestra members made clear the fact that well-trained young players form a natural connection with Mozart’s music. Ido Shpitalnik’s direction was articulate. Not to be ignored is this ensemble’s excellent intonation and fine wind section.