Hulett/Alder/Classical Opera/Page, Wigmore Hall, classical review: A secure mastery of form and effect

The Mozart recitatives could almost have been products of his maturity

Classical Opera (Benjamin Ealovega )

Ian Page and his Classical Opera Company are now embarked on an arresting project entitled Mozart 250: an epic journey reflecting 27 years of Mozart’s creativity. This concert consisted of music composed in 1766, when the ten-year-old composer was being rushed round Europe to give concerts with his sister Nannerl.

Page’s selection of works was designed to reflect not only Mozart’s precocious music but what he would have heard, and possibly been influenced by: thus we might distinguish between what was typical of the time, and what was unique to his burgeoning genius. Two singers were on hand for the arias: soprano Louise Alder, and tenor Benjamin Hulett.

If one of the Mozart symphonies felt formulaic, the other revealed a secure mastery of form and effect, and the Mozart recitatives could almost have been products of his maturity. Meanwhile it was fascinating to encounter works by two composers of whom most of us hadn’t heard, and who might, if the dice had landed differently, have now been household names – Johann Baptist Vanhal and Franz Ignaz Beck. And while Alder despatched a Vauxhall Gardens song with winning charm, Hulett took us into the empyrean with a soaringly beautiful Haydn ‘Et incarnatus est’.