By Nancy Plum
Over the past decades, Princeton University Concerts has developed enduring relationships with performers worldwide, always expanding the PUC artist family. The Mahler Chamber Orchestra has long been one of these partners, returning to Princeton several times to showcase the excellence of its international roster. Founded in 1997 as an artistic “global collective,” the Orchestra is comprised of musicians from 25 countries who come together for each tour or project, exploring instrumental dialogue and the “sound of listening” though a wide range of repertoire.
The Mahler Chamber Orchestra revisited Richardson Auditorium last Thursday night under the leadership of pianist/conductor Mitsuko Uchida, who is particularly well known for her interpretation of the works of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Uchida’s performances of the piano concertos of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are considered a gold standard, and it was two of these concertos which she and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra brought to the Princeton stage.
Mozart composed more than 25 concertos for piano and orchestra, many of which were vehicles for his own performance as soloist. Piano Concerto No. 18 in B-flat Major, dating from 1784, was one of six written that year alone, part of a constant demand for new works from the prodigious composer. These works may have originally involved a great deal of improvisation from the soloist, and as pianist, Uchida highlighted the imaginative aspects of the music and its inherent virtuosity. more
Mexico’s Mysterious Stranger” is the way James Agee characterized B. Traven in his February 2, 1948 Time review of John Huston’s film adaptation of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I’ve been haunted by Traven’s multi-faceted invisibility ever since last week’s column on the “disappearing poet” Weldon Kees, who told a friend in his last phone call in May 1955: “I may go to Mexico. To stay.” My interest in Traven began in earnest on Albert Einstein’s birthday, March 14, Pi Day in Princeton, after hearing that Traven’s The Death Ship (Das Totenschiff), published in German in 1926, is the novel Einstein named when asked what book he’d take to a desert island.
