Mineral water helps with Mozart – Paavo Järvi conducts the last three symphonies of the classic

The conductor is exhausted. A program like this, featuring the last three Mozart symphonies, is more strenuous than an entire Mahler symphony, he sighs, and downs several glasses of mineral water. On Wednesday afternoon, Paavo Järvi arrives directly from the dress rehearsal for this week's Tonhalle concerts to the presentation of the new 2025/26 season. But his mind is initially still on the marvels he intends to present to the audience that evening. This music is so fulfilling, he enthuses, but also so immensely demanding.

In fact, leading orchestras and conductors are now remarkably rare in daring to perform an entire program of Mozart's works—a curious circumstance, considering that this Viennese classic remained at the center of the concert repertoire until the late 20th century. But, to the chagrin of many music lovers, this has long been a thing of the past. When ensembles today focus exclusively on Mozart—as the Lucerne Festival Orchestra did with Igor Levit at the KKL a few days ago—they have to offer something truly exclusive. Because everyone expects a feast.

The orchestra's restraint has little to do with the exceptional status of these works, which no one disputes. Rather, Mozart interpretation has lost its innocence due to the triumph of historically informed performance practice: Today, you can no longer simply put these pieces on the podium, let them play, and be done with it. Instead, numerous preliminary considerations are required: regarding the size of the ensemble, the mood, the selection of the right instruments—for example, whether, as was done now in Zurich, to add accents with gloriously rumbling kettledrums and the horns and trumpets that were still valveless in Mozart's time.

Järvi is deeply familiar with such questions, especially through his years of work with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. "Original sound" is no longer new territory for the Tonhalle Orchestra, either, since the era of David Zinman. But it seems time for this tradition to be refreshed. On Wednesday evening, it takes a while to find a unified approach in the opening E-flat major Symphony. Initially, the sound lacks the core and, above all, the clarity essential for this richly detailed, imaginative music.

Because everything is open in Mozart's work and every note truly counts, you can hear even the slightest blurred entry, the smallest shift in the ensemble, and even the careless fading of individual notes. Romantic repertoire, the core competency of today's symphony orchestras, is more forgiving in this regard. But the Tonhalle musicians are gratifyingly quick to remember the precision and, increasingly, the paradox of a rich, yet always playful lightness that are required here.

By the famous Symphony in G minor, Järvi had achieved a balance between the classically austere external form and the sometimes wildly torn moods Mozart conjures here, even if the piece sounds less fatalistic than in Harnoncourt's late work. Mozart's affinity to opera becomes even more tangible in the "Jupiter Symphony," which sounds so dramatic, yet at times so lyrically intimate, as if it were a companion piece to "Don Giovanni." The polyphonic feats of the final movement, played with extreme virtuosity, not only crown Mozart's last symphony, but also bring the entire ninety-minute cycle to a conclusive, triumphant conclusion.

Further performances: June 5 and 6, Zurich, Tonhalle, Grosser Saal.