Orchestra’s Mozart celebration

Yannick dresses flamboyantly (open collar at concerts, jeans and sneakers at post-concert talkbacks); Lisiecki performed Saturday night in a conservative tux and polka-dot bow tie. Yannick seems to thrive on interaction with musicians and audiences; Lisiecki seems comfortable just with himself and, perhaps, the company of a dead composer. Stick him on a stage with a great orchestra or two (he actually played with two orchestras this weekend, since the Philadelphia ensemble was split in half to accommodate Mozart’s smaller requirements) and he’d surely be happy; but I suspect Lisiecki would be just as happy alone in his studio with Mozart.

Lisiecki “was capable enough," two different people remarked to me at intermission, "but I wasn’t sure what he was trying to say.” To me, this remarkable concert conveyed the sublime pleasure that Mozart and other great composers can bring to people of otherwise dissimilar personas. (I found myself thinking of the Orchestra's former music director Riccardo Muti and his predecessor, Eugene Ormandy, who had nothing at all in common save for their love of music.) Yannick said afterward that ordinarily he doesn’t devote an entire program to a single composer because “I want to draw lines between composers.” In this case he used a single composer to draw lines between two musicians of very different styles, both of whom, if we’re lucky, will be communicating musically for many years to come.