Later Friday afternoon, I dropped by the last of Spoleto’s Intermezzi concerts at Grace Episcopal Church, where Emmanuel Villaume and the Spoleto Festival Orchestra were performing an all-Mozart program: his popular Concerto No. 2 for Flute and Orchestra and the Symphony No. 40, one of his most well known.
(Side note: last Tuesday, I stopped by the Charleston County Main Library downtown in the early afternoon to catch a few minutes of their American Film Series, which on that day featured Milos Foreman’s wonderful Amadeus. With two of Mozart’s operas in this year’s festival (Don Giovanni in Spoleto and The Abduction from the Seraglio in Piccolo), plus a host of other presentations in the two festivals, including Friday’s Intermezzi concert, it was interesting to watch once again Peter Shaffer’s fantastic film about one of the world’s greatest creative geniuses. Plus F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce are brilliant as Salieri and Mozart.)
Music in Time director John Kennedy came in a little late and joined me in the back of the church where I was standing. “I hate the seats in here,” he confided. “I’d rather stand in the back than sit.” Given that Mozart’s 40th Symphony is one of only two he wrote in a minor key (G minor) — and that because he was heavily influenced by the Sturm und Drang (”Storm and Stress”) movement prevailing in Germany and Austria at the time, it occurred to me afterward that Kennedy may also have been checking out the historical precendents for his own new work, entitled Storm and Stress, which opened the Festival Concert last Sunday. Didn’t have the chance to ask him, but he did apologize for not making it to A Perfect Ten the previous evening. Which I thought was awfully nice of him.