A mischievous Mozart

Mozart’s Mass in C Minor is a mess of unanswered questions. Musicologists wonder why the composer never finished it. The torso, which contains nearly an hour of performable music, outlines what would have been one of the grandest scaled Masses of Mozart’s time, and a rebelliously operatic one at that.

Officially, the score was a votive Mass for Mozart’s wife, Constanze. Maybe she had been ill. Maybe Mozart wanted to celebrate the birth of their first child. Maybe he had begun the Mass earlier as a wedding present, a celebration of their having out-schemed in-laws. Constanze was a soprano, and maybe he just wanted to give her something dazzling to show off.

But one thing was immediately obvious from a radiant performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen on Thursday night in Walt Disney Concert Hall: the Mass has everything to do with Mozart’s feelings for Constanze at the time, erotic and otherwise. If the Mass sounded as theatrically sensual at the first performance, given in Salzburg’s St. Peter’s Abbey in 1783, the devout most surely blushed.

The Mass begins in funereal minor key somberness, all old style, churchy threats of brimstone and doom. But in less than five minutes, a mischievous Mozart had expected Constanze to soften the stuffy tone soaring on wings of her own.

Let the chorus thunder, the trombones threaten, she will swirl her coloratura like a cheerleader with a baton, give in to her rapt passion and use her vocal wiles to turns the heads of clergymen who pretend not to notice her.

The soprano the Philharmonic hired is Miah Persson, who has a busy young career making the rounds, mostly in Mozart opera and mostly in Europe.

This summer the Swedish Bis label released a recording of the Swedish soprano singing Mozart operas with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra that didn’t get much noticed (at least outside of Sweden), inevitably lost in the vast crowd of higher-profiled CDs celebrating Mozart’s 250th birthday.

But if her ravishing performance Thursday is anything to go by, we have a major new Mozartean singer in our midst. Persson seemed like two sopranos in one, rising from a dark, musky, heavy lower range that unexpectedly opens into bright, thrillingly radiant and flexible highs.

She was joined by a Swedish mezzo-soprano, Malena Ernman, more stern but imposingly dramatic and gripping. Mozart had the ladies on his mind in this Mass; the men have little to sing, but Finnish tenor Topi Lehtipuu proved acute and accurate, while the American bass-baritone Wayne Tigges was elegant, if understated.

Nothing else about the performance, which also featured a large and impressively aggressive Los Angeles Master Chorale, was understated. Salonen, who began the evening with Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms” was in a Stravinskyan frame of mind.

The orchestra was not large, but Salonen used it in a large way, the sound full-out modern. Instrumental textures were rich. Accents were sharp, cutting. Otto Klemperer might have conducted it this way had he been a young man in the 21st century with “Don Giovanni” on his mind.

The Master Chorale contributed to the power of the performance. I would have liked fewer singers, but only if it meant no fewer thrills.

The “Symphony of Psalms” was also unusually thrilling and unusually Stravinskyan. That is to say that Stravinsky’s 1930 setting of three Psalms texts for chorus and a small orchestra of low strings, winds and percussion, is a prayerful, devout score much loved for its delicacy, formality, devotion.

Incense of the Orthodoxy, to which Stravinsky had recently returned, wafts through the Psalms. And unlike Mozart’s emotionally messy Mass, the symphony is finished music, every note contrapuntally in place.

Salonen, however, punctured the churchy frame by emphasizing a more grating, powerful, in-your-face approach. He let the bass drum quake. He shaped dynamics with startling care. As in Mozart, he brought drama and sensuality into the room. The ending was stunningly beautiful.

He may also have taken a bit too much for granted, assuming the orchestra can play Stravinsky in its sleep, which it often can. The central movement, with its intricate wind fugue, was not tight. “Symphony of Psalms,” written for the Boston Symphony and its great Symphony Hall, sounds even greater in Disney. But Disney doesn’t let you get away with anything.

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mark.swed@latimes.com