Reaching Across the Generations at Blackheath Halls

Rosebud Ensemble:MozART in London

Mark Cartmell

Blackheath Halls in south London welcomed an audience rather different from its usual lunchtime crowd last week, Monday 4th November. Seated on either side of the hall were around fifty primary school children from two local schools. For some this may have been their first experience of a formal classical concert, others might not yet have known how to distinguish a violin from a viola or a cello. In the middle sat the regulars of the Blackheath Music Appreciation Group, a community whose members gather weekly to attend lectures, listen to recordings and discuss music. Today, they had exchanged the lecture room for a live performance. All had gathered for  Mozart. Born 270 years ago, the Austrian composer still has the remarkable ability to bring people of different generations and musical backgrounds together under one roof.

This was a lunchtime recital, an hour long, and part of Blackheath Halls’ reassuringly regular Lunchtime Recital series. Mozart was not merely the child prodigy of music textbooks. He was once a young performer, visiting London with his father, who spent fifteen months in London and performed for King George III. Now, on a grey south London afternoon, the young musicians of Rosebud Ensemble were setting out to decipher the delights of one of classical music’s most famous child prodigies.

The Duo for Violin and Viola, K.423, provided something of a light and intimate prelude. Without a piano or cello to underpin the bass, the two string instruments had to establish a complete musical world between them. The violin and viola share a family resemblance in tone, yet possess distinctly different expressive personalities. Their conversation depends not on the weight and richness of a larger ensemble, but on clarity of phrasing and a particularly attentive musical ear. The children tapped their fingers and toes responding to the rhythm, while the retirees nodded their approval.

The afternoon’s most demanding chamber music partnership came in the Violin Sonata in B-flat major, K.454, where the musical conversation passed between violin and piano. By the time Mozart composed K.454, the violin was no longer merely an ornament to the piano, nor was the piano simply a modern substitute for the continuo. Each instrument had its own character, and found it’s space. Pianist Jiacheng Zhu resisted any temptation to make the piano the dominant voice. In the exposition, his touch was restrained, his tone warm and his pedalling economical, leaving Ezo Sarici’s violin ample room to breathe. As the development unfolded, the piano began to press forward, and Ezo responded with a fuller, more assertive sound. Their rhythmic interplay was not always perfectly seamless, but those slight, unmistakably live moments of imperfect alignment gave Mozart’s musical drama a sense of spontaneity. Rather than sounding meticulously rehearsed, it seemed to be unfolding there and then.

As the children, after almost an hour of sitting and listening, began to grow restless, the mood changed. The first movement of Eine kleine Nachtmusik was the moment everyone had been waiting for. The children might not have known the title, but as soon as the familiar melody emerged, little hands began to wave and sway, while one boy started tapping the beat against his knee. Teachers and attendant parents breathed a sigh of relief. Here, Mozart’s most accessible side ceased to be merely an example of a “gateway piece” to classical music. Instead, it became something altogether more immediate: the easy pleasure of a roomful of people recognising the same tune at once. Across several centuries, Mozart’s inescapable gift for melody brought a room of school children and retired music aficionado’s together. There was a genuine sense of magic in the air.

The capitalised “ART” in the title MoART in London might have seemed a little self-conscious in another setting. Yet, on this particular afternoon, it achieved something important: it opened up the often impenetrable world of classical music, allowing Mozart to step down from his pedestal and walk among us mere mortals.

For one lunchtime hour in Blackheath Mozart reached the old and young alike, and neither seemed to feel short-changed.