Bach, Mozart, and Philip Glass in Sintra

 Sintra is a delightful hill town west of Lisbon and a few miles north of my home in Cascais. It's home to many fancy palaces, where the royals and wealthy of Lisbon went in the past to escape summer heat. 

Now Sintra is a suburban community that hosts lots of tourists, as well as an annual summer music festival. I recently saw two VERY different concerts there. The renowned pianist Andras Schiff is a Hungarian-born British pianist, now in his 70s, who these days specializes in Bach. 

His Sintra recital featured Bach in the first half, and Mozart pieces mostly influenced by Bach in the second half. The recital was superb. Schiff uses very clean articulation and minimal pedal. While he cannot make the piano sound like a harpsichord, he accomplishes the clarity of its inner voices really well. There was no  printed program, and Schiff introduced each piece verbally (in English) in an engaging and intimate way, complete with little examples to explain what we were about to hear. This gave the recital a sense of intimacy, especially given the rapt audience and smallish hall (about 500 seats, with really good acoustics). The Bach repertory was well chosen for the modern piano. Schiff began with a charming early (age 18) Capriccio written on the departure of Bach's brother, replete with a small fugue emulating the horses' hooves and signal horn as the coachman departed. The Italian Concerto was a nostalgic piece for me, as it was my first student recital piece at Pomona College in 1976. The work simulates the back and forth of orchestra and  soloist then in fashion in Italy with composers like Corelli.  As Schiff pointed out, Bach never left Germany but was very up to date on musical trends throughout Europe; he then incorporated these into his own works. This pan-euro tendency was also clear in the fifth French Suite, which included dance movements from multiple countries, eg an Allemande from Germany, a Courante from France, and a Gigue (Jig) from England. Schiff wryly pointed out that a Brexit from music would have been a disaster for Bach, since removing Gigues from suites would be disfiguring.  The most elaborate piece was the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, which was Bach at his thorniest and richest.

The Mozart pieces played in the second half were mostly Bach-influenced (Mozart and Haydn researched mostly-forgotten Bach works in a private Vienna library). The late sonatas in F (K 533) and B flat (K 570) both included short fugal sections. The Fantasia in C minor (K 475) had flourishes that reminded me of Bach preludes/fantasias in the organ works. It also contained an ultra-compact precis of the opera Don Giovanni. Lastly, Schiff played the short but modernistic G minor Gigue (K 574), a weird Bachian salute composed two years before Mozart's death. Overall this was an un-bombastic, exquisite recital played by a pianist who no longer needs to show off or impress anyone. It felt like we were entering his private musical world. 

The other, very different concert I saw at the Sintra Festival was the Philip Glass chamber opera In the Penal Colony, composed in 2000 to a text adapted from a Franz Kafka short story. It's a harrowing 80 minute work about a torture/capital punishment machine that slowly kills prisoners by carving descriptions of the condemned's crimes into his chest, causing a slow and excruciating death. The officer in charge worships the machine, but when he cannot get a neutral "observer" to validate the machine's excellence, the officer himself submits to the machine's tortures to validate its existence. Ironically, the officer is prevented from the desired slow death by a machine malfunction that quickly pierces his skull--the machine then self-destructs. The largely declamatory text is accompanied by a string quintet playing typical Glass arpeggios and sustained, slowly moving harmonies, occasionally punctuated by harsh dissonance to match the gory spectacle onstage. Surprising for a production in reserved Portugal, there was extended full frontal male nudity throughout, as well as blood-curdling screams from the two singers. I wondered what the elderly ladies next to me thought! This was not a masterpiece, but quite an experience.