KSO This Week: Pianist Fei-Fei Dong and Conductor Edwin Outwater in Mozart and Schumann

When Milos Foreman’s film Amadeus was released in 1984—later winning the Oscar for Best Picture—the justifiable ebullience in the classical music world was often tempered with a number of “…buts.” For some, the substantial creative license taken by Peter Shaffer in his original play and in his adaptation into a motion picture script was perhaps entertaining, but also unfortunate as it could conceivably alter the public’s perception of Mozart’s real life. After all, as happens in many biopics, Shaffer based his quasi-fictional take on rumor, gossip, and “alternative facts,” departing in a number of ways from the documented events and timeline of the composer’s life and death.

Nevertheless, the success of Amadeus opened the door to a new awareness of Mozart’s music by the general public, as well as creating a renewed interest in classical music audiences for the Mozart works used in the soundtrack. With compact discs appearing in 1982, Mozart CD sales went through the roof as people rushed out to update their nascent CD collections with Mozart recordings made popular by Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the conductor and orchestra used for the film.

One Mozart work that received renewed exposure from the film—but hardly needed it—was the Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466, with the second movement of it being used in film’s closing credits. The minor key somber tonality and the lack of ostentation worked well for this usage, but those qualities have also been the work’s attraction to audiences through the years, an example of Mozart’s ability to craft extreme beauty through simplicity.

That concerto is a featured work on this week’s KSO Masterworks concert with pianist Fei-Fei Dong.

Sharing the KSO bill this week with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 will be the Schumann Symphony No. 2 in C Major, perhaps the least-often played of the Schumann four. I can state without hesitation that it will have a better time of it this week with the KSO than it did at its premiere in 1846 at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig. With Felix Mendelssohn on the podium, that concert began with the overture and lengthy excerpts from Weber’s Euryanthe followed by the overture and even lengthier excerpts from Rossini’s William Tell. After the audience demanded an encore of the William Tell Overture, the exhausted conductor and orchestra finally got around to the Schumann premiere. The audience was reportedly not amused. Thankfully, the symphony was received quite differently with fresh ears several days later.

Guest conductor for the week, Edwin Outwater, will open the concert with a 2011 work by Missy Mazzoli: Violent, Violent Sea.