The Jacksonville Symphony Takes on Mozart’s Classics with Nartadjieva and Kuo
By Matt Bickett
“Classical music” has always held a handful of meanings. Your middle school chorus teacher was likely quick to remind you that it’s not just a genre on Spotify. “Classical refers to the period in music history after the Baroque and before the Romantic,” she might say, distinguishing the term from its reference to the classics of literature. But like the timeless writings of the ancient Greeks, or the Rolling Stones hits that never seem to be forgotten, the classics are revered as the music that shapes our culture. Classical music perennially reappears on the concert stage for good reason—this music reconnects us with our history, our culture and ourselves.
The Jacksonville Symphony under the baton of Courtney Lewis dutifully continued this tradition last weekend, joining forces with impressive soloists and the Jacksonville Symphony Chorus in two concerts. The program, Classical composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante in E-flat major and Requiem, inspired one of the 75th season’s most traditional yet well-executed concerts.
Concertmaster and soloist Adelya Nartadjieva with Principal Violist and soloist Yun-Ting Kuo joined the Symphony for a characterful rendition of Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante. The work’s playful dialogue highlighted the two soloists’ teamwork—the evenness and depth of Kuo’s tone provided an ideal complement to Nartadjieva’s extroverted, yet equally nuanced, flair.
Nartadjieva’s outspoken interpretation never overshadowed her duet partner or the ensemble and the ensemble responded in kind with sensitivity and support throughout. Kuo’s mature and thoughtful approach revealed hidden layers to the score’s genius phrasing, even while some of the passages’ lower range notes receded from view.
Despite your middle school music teacher’s concert-going instructions, applause after the first movement felt appropriate. The applause aided the transition from the excitement of the first movement’s duo cadenza and sunny phrases to the seriousness of the second. The two soloists’ dramatic intensity in tone and phrasing took a turn to the profound.
After such depth, Mozart’s almost perfunctory third movement felt out of place. The performers’ encore—Johan Halvorsen’s arrangement of the Passacaglia movement from one of George Frideric Handel’s Harpsichord Suites—made up for the lost moment. After the encore’s dramatic journey, the audience left for intermission even more convinced of the magical results of the Nartadjieva-Kuo collaboration.
Following the delights and playful drama of the first half, the program’s second half turned to the bigger questions that often occupy authors of the classics. Mozart’s final work, the Requiem—a nearly hour-long meditation on death and the afterlife through musical settings of the Church’s funeral texts—calls on the forces of four soloists, chorus and orchestra to do so.
Joining the slightly smaller Classical-era orchestra, the Jacksonville Symphony invited soloists with voices specially trained for the light tone required by Mozart’s music. The Jacksonville Symphony Chorus, under the direction of Donald McCullough, appeared next to helpfully projected English translations of the sung texts.
The performance highlighted the grandeur possible in Mozart’s many intricacies. The ensemble’s winds provided a strong foundation in the work’s iconic opening bars. Particularly in the Kyrie and Sanctus, Lewis masterfully maintained attention to the performance’s overall affect while shaping the intricate interweaving of voice parts. Similarly, in the Recordare, soprano Nola Richardson and countertenor Reginald Mobley responded to each other’s sophisticated and well-informed phrasing in one of the highlights of the night.
Lewis’s balanced focus on fine details amidst larger forces at play lent this performance a particular freshness. As the classics continue to make their recurrence, last weekend’s performance confronted us with the question, what does it mean to perform Mozart’s Requiem now? For the Jacksonville Symphony, perhaps it’s that no detail is too small or insignificant to be cherished even among the larger-than-life feelings of the political moment—that we will perennially take effort to remember even the quiet voices among the outspoken crowd, and for good reason.
Review by Matt Bickett | Concerts were May 16 & 17, 2025
Matt Bickett is a musician and scholar based in Jacksonville, FL. Matt is Director of Music at St. Paul’s by the Sea Episcopal Church in Jacksonville Beach and is a Corps Member with Teach for America.
