MOZART + MARSEILLAISE
Australian National Academy of Music
Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre
Wednesday November 12, 2025
Paavali Jumpaanen
Just finishing his fifth year in charge of the Australian National Academy of Music as that body’s artistic director, pianist Paavali Jumpaanen appeared as soloist in front of his organization’s orchestra last Wednesday morning in an exemplary reading of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C Major K. 503. I’m not an enthusiast of his Beethoven interpretations; admittedly, it’s been several years since I heard him toying with some of them in this very hall. But you would be scratching at a finely-polished surface to find any holes in his work here.
He played/conducted from a grand positioned vertically into the young ensemble; necessarily when a musician does this, the instrument’s lid has to come off (unless you’re super-secure in your accompaniment). So a reasonable amount of Jumpaanen’s output went straight up to the Murdoch Hall’s ceiling. But you had to make allowances for the uneven balance in any case. The ANAM orchestra had eight violins in this configuration, three each of violas and cellos, and a pair of double basses. Ranged across the back wall were the requisite wind for this work: flute, plus pairs of oboes, bassoons, trumpets and horns, with a discreet timpanist for light punctuation.
The problem came with the over-bright wind dynamic bounding out into our faces. This isn’t to decry the upper strings who spoke with as much firmness and congruity as I’ve heard from ANAM orchestras in the past. They had no problems with Jumpaanen whose attack mode was necessarily muted but, outside the central F Major Andante, the woodwind quintet in particular dominated the combined texture at key moments like bar 54 in the first Allegro, and in antiphonal passages as between bars 84 and 87. Yes, the brass contributed to this ascendancy, the clear trumpets in particular, so that when the whole phalanx was in operation, the violin quartet pairs came close to inaudible.
To add to the problem, this is one of the last concertos and Mozart’s orchestral fabric picks out individual voicers among the woodwind with even more concentration than in earlier works, like the fine F Major K. 459 of 1784, two years prior to this C Major masterwork. In the orchestral ritornelli of the first movement, this quintet follows independent paths, even if the oboes and bassoons are harmonically paired for much of the time. As well, you had some splendid passages of interaction with the soloist in the first movement e.g. bars 195 to 214, then 256 to 282: pointed pleasures that enjoyed transparent delivery from all concerned.
Further, this C Major concerto has an ideal balance as its outer movements are comparable in space allowed for soloistic display and thematic variation/development. With regard to the former, Jumpaanen displayed a mastery of the composer’s hard-hat filigree and calm progress between themes which impress as more concentrated rather than thrown around with abandon, as in the earlier essays by the composer in this form. Indeed, I recall commenting on this lavish abundance of melodic material from the younger Mozart in his early and middle Viennese concertos to Kenneth Hince, who opined that I had much to learn about those works, viz. Nos. 11 to 21 and the composer’s novel treatment of the piano in both of those first movement segments that used to be called exposition and development; these terms seem insufficient, however, when dealing with this C Major score.
For all that, Jumpaanen exercised an unusual discretion that stayed just the right side of finnickiness in the work’s first two sections, then embraced the Allegretto with an effective deliberation, finding a welcome fluency in the piano’s opening from bar 32 with its initial chain of mordents, an abrupt rush of demi-semiquavers, immediately followed by a burst of triplets that at least don’t come out of nowhere but reflect the orchestra’s conclusion to its opening tutti; in all, an exuberant misdirection of attention that keeps you listening hard.
The pianist proceeded to exercise telling control through the triplets that become the instrument’s stock in trade before actually settling down to revisit the opening theme at bar 113. As usual, appealing moments kept lurching out, as at the fluent solo beginning at bar 234 that brings in the first oboe and then flute before a luminous duo-quartet-trio of woodwind takes over the running at bar 187 for several pages of simple, clear-cut dissertation. From here on, apart from a 7-bar break, the pianist is on the go and I liked the way Jumpaanen made himself available to the texture in page after page of supporting passage-work, then broke through with no insistence when the piano moved into solo mode.
A thoroughly engaging reading, then, and quite unlike his eccentric expositions of some decades ago. The only complaint I have is Jumpaanen’s introduction of La Marseillaise in the final moments of his first movement cadenza – I suppose in some effort to justify the pairing of this event’s title. Some commentators have noted a resemblance between Rouget de Lisle’s rousing anthem of 1792 and one of the secondary theme in this concerto’s first movement. The comparison lasts little more than a bar but optimists believe there is some connection between the two composers. Well, the Frenchman definitely wrote the words but the music could date back some years to the violinist Viotti. More importantly, what chance did a French military engineer living in Strasbourg have of hearing an Austrian piano concerto written six years earlier? A small one, you’d think.
To establish some musical context, this concert opened with duo-pianists Timothy Young (ANAM’s resident piano guru) and Po Goh performing a version of the anthem arranged by Young in the best Mozart/Beethoven tradition. As a result, we were treated to a rather restrained interpretation of one of the world’s most rousing national songs, but I suppose Young was setting up a context rather than entering into Berlioz-type histrionics and triumphalism; his atmospherics related more to the salon than storming the Bastille.
As a prelude to the concerto, four ANAM musicians played two of the four-hand Mozart sonatas. Francis Atkins and Sarah Chick worked at the K. 381 in D Major, written in 1772 and the first of the authentic and complete works by the composer in this format. This is digitally easy to negotiate but somehow the players struggled with its mechanics: Atkins with some misfiring soprano notes and Chick handling several muddy Alberti-bass passages, due I think to an over-use of the sustaining pedal. Admittedly, I was comparing this performance with one available online given by Lucas and Arthur Jussen; the Dutch duo are, to put it mildly, very impressive and their Mozart reading flawless.
Still, if you’re attending ANAM, your standard must be close to the near-professional. Unfortunately, the following pair of Liam Furey and Timothy O’Malley sounded uncomfortably paired for the B flat Major K. 358 of two years later, their ensemble occasionally unhappy in its ornamentation as well as erratic in the strict synchronicity that this music requires. As with Atkins and Chick, this duo repeated the first half of each movement (I think!), everybody cutting their work-load by a quarter. But the cleanest accomplished part of the four came from O’Malley, despite the lack of prominence in his Secondo for the Adagio and that infectious Molto presto that concludes this happy brevity.
O'Connell the Music 