Pepetone honors Mozart’s legacy

     His fingers danced atop the keys with pinpoint precision, while the rest of him sat straight and silent. His head bobbed slightly with the high notes, and audience members in the front row kept tempo with their feet. “Mozart Abroad,” a collection of four of Mozart’s sonatas, was performed in the Max Noah Recital Hall on Sept. 11 by Professor of Music Gregory Pepetone. The house was full to capacity with students and faculty.
Lending an air of humor to an otherwise somber 9/11 evening, Pepetone wore a purple dress shirt and tie and received a pleasant laugh from the crowd when his piano chair was too short. He shrugged and smiled in his dignified manner. “Best laid plans and all,” Pepetone said, swapping the chairs and beginning the show.
     In his opening speech on the importance of Mozart’s music, now two hundred and fifty years old, Pepetone contrasted the optimism of Mozart’s music with the tragedy of the terrorist attacks. “We live in a world of sham art, sham politics,” Pepetone said, and talked about the response of society that either gets so fed up with the hypocrisy and the terror and becomes cynical and untrusting or denies the truth and pretends that everything is okay. “Mozart is one of those rare individuals who offers us a third way. He is a profound optimist.”
     According to Pepetone, Mozart’s optimism allowed him to face the difficult times in which he lived as an “idealist without illusions.” He was always looking for something better and taking every step, in his art, to bring that better world to his own. “He was not a revolutionary,” Pepetone said. “He was content to accept the world as it was. We don’t have that much anymore.”
     During the recital, students scribbled notes in their books, passed drawings back and forth, and a few worked on their homework, but none could deny that they were enthralled by the music. Elizabeth Currier, a junior early childhood education major, congratulated Pepetone after the show along with a group of friends.
     “I just want to say that the music was beautiful,” she said.
Pepetone acknowledges that the music is not to everyone’s tastes.   “Mozart is an acquired taste,” Pepetone later said in his office, “He doesn’t have the immediacy of appeal that Beethoven and Chopin have.” Nonetheless Pepetone admitted that in periods of his own life he would find himself turning back to Mozart rather than his contemporaries.
    “There’s a balance, in Mozart’s music, between the ideal and the real,” Pepetone said.
To Pepetone, Mozart isn’t just a musical score or even beautiful music. He called it an “unfolding drama. You have characters and conflicts that have to be resolved. I think that the similarities between the thespian art and the art of music interpretation are very many.”
      Consequently, no two Mozart recitals are the same.
“With Mozart there’s more need for interpretation,” Pepetone said. “It’s easy to ignore the dramatic undercurrents of the music and simply treat it as a piano problem.”
Pepetone rarely listens to Mozart sonatas anymore. He doesn’t need too. The sonatas are in his fingers, in his head. He’s been “programming” himself for these sonatas for two years; first learning the notes, then refining and refining. Now he’s ready to sit in Mozart’s chair for a series of recitals, the last of which will be performed on Feb. 25, and will showcase the last four sonatas Mozart wrote before his death in Vienna.
Pepetone’s final edict was from France Hubert’s “Mozartiana” and reflects his own resounding view of the man and the music, “What a picture of a better world you have given us, Mozart.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Sep 22 2006. Filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry