Better by several light-years was the afternoon's concerto, the Mozart "Coronation," with the young (born 1979) Italian pianist Gianluca Cascioli as soloist. Here, for once, is a new musician of genuine quality and, therefore, genuine promise. Serious of mien and of countenance, he did not flirt with the music or with the audience. He made the music as beautiful as it was meant to be, and did so with a genuine sense of what Mozart might have been about in this, the next to last of his miraculous run of piano concertos. He supplied his own cadenzas; these, too, were full of invention but never beyond the limits of Mozart's own harmonic language. The give and take between his piano and Abbado's properly cut-down orchestra was — as I was saying about Jane Glover's Seraglioback there — another fine example of chamber music writ large. I note with interest but some despair that Signor Cascioli is currently studying electronic music at the Milan Conservatory. Mozart, too, needs his touch.
"CHERISH THE HYBRIDS," LOU Harrison once told me in a radio interview. "They're all we've got." The most benevolent of all hybrid composers, Lou, 85, left us last weekend — mere days before Bill Bolcom's Songs of Innocence and Experience, a hybrid masterpiece if ever one was, gets its first local hearing. Strange how things work out. More next week.
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