In San Diego, the Main man

SAN DIEGO â€”  It has been close to five months since Mozart’s 250th birthday, a milestone so major that even the musical skinflints at National Public Radio sent a couple of correspondents to Salzburg to cover the celebration in the composer’s Austrian birthplace breathless sportscaster style.

But that was only the beginning. Mozart is all over the map every spring and summer, and much more so this year.

Last month in Tokyo, for instance, the Japanese squeezed 377 Mozart concerts into four days. The result -- attended by nearly three-quarters of a million people -- was called “Days of Enthusiasm.�

This year’s Salzburg Festival, for its part, will stage every last one of Mozart’s 22 operas, boring juvenilia and all. Germany is hosting a 280-mile bicycle tour through towns Mozart visited. There are Mozart festivals in Wurzburg, Warsaw and Woodstock (that’s Woodstock, N.Y., and Woodstock, Ill.).

It only makes sense, then, that in the San Diego area, this year’s Mainly Mozart Festival, which included a superb performance of the composer’s Clarinet Concerto at the city’s Copley Symphony Hall on Saturday night and will conclude next weekend with performances of the composer’s Requiem in Tijuana and San Diego, would be tempted to swallow an extra dose or two of growth hormone to keep up.

Begun 18 years ago by the British conductor David Atherton as a knockoff of Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, with casual outdoor concerts at the Old Globe Theatre in Balboa Park, Mainly Mozart is now a binational enterprise. It runs throughout the first half of the year and for the 250th birthday will have included 270 Mozart-themed events all around San Diego County, Tijuana and other northern Baja California cities.

That activity has made it the largest Mozart festival in North America. The rejuvenated Mostly Mozart back East remains glitzier and more adventurous. Along with the standard orchestral concerts at Lincoln Center, that quintessential New York summertime event, now 40 years old, this year will offer a Peter Sellars staging of Mozart’s early opera “Zaide� viewed in light of the international slave trade; a semistaged performance of “Idomeneo� from William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants; the premiere of some dances to Mozart commissioned from choreographer Mark Morris; and the first performance of a violin concerto by Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg.

Surprisingly, Mainly Mozart has tended to stick closer to traditional Mozartiana -- surprisingly not because San Diego’s classical music institutions are hotbeds of the avant-garde but because Atherton made his reputation as a specialist in modern music. He was a founder of the London Sinfonietta, England’s leading new music ensemble, and he is noted as a conductor of 20th century opera.

This summer, the orchestral concerts have been not mainly but all Mozart, but chamber music performances have ventured into wider repertory. Last month, the Cuarteto Latinamericano premiered the festival’s first classical commission, a string quartet by Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz. And smatterings of Gershwin, Glass and Golijov have turned up on the festival’s chamber programs in the last three weeks.

Had the festival wanted, it could have gone even further afield with guest clarinetist Michael Collins, who was soloist in the concerto Saturday. The festival’s secret weapon has long been the caliber of the musicians Atherton attracts. The orchestra is made up of players from around the country. In an embarrassment of riches, it has the concertmasters of both the Cleveland Orchestra and the Pittsburgh Symphony (the latter’s Andres Cardenes was on hand Saturday).

Though best known for his advocacy of new music -- his colorful, playful, virtuosic recordings of clarinet concertos by John Adams and Elliott Carter will not likely be bettered for some time -- Collins chose not only to stick to Mozart in San Diego but to do so on the basset clarinet, the kind for which Mozart wrote but which is now extinct. Longer than the modern clarinet in A, this 18th century reed instrument had a lower range and mellower tone.

Performing on an instrument he had specially made (but without the eccentric angled bend of the original), Collins brought out a richness in the concerto, with its glowing slow movement, that interpretations on a latter-day clarinet lack. But the basset clarinet also proved a mixed blessing. It doesn’t project as well as its modern successors and lacks their brilliance -- useful qualities for a large, acoustically dry converted movie palace.

Still, Collins brought to the performance a remarkable sense of play and a sharply, shapely modern sensibility. It is easy to get sentimental about this concerto, Mozart’s last, and to search in it for a mystically autumnal atmosphere and premonitions of death. Collins sought out, instead, life, embellishing melodies with a giddy glee and bringing out its deep roots in dance and aria.

Atherton is a vigilant Mozart conductor who gives serious attention to rhythm. He let the Symphony No. 26, which opened the program, and the “Posthorn� Serenade, which closed it, be youthful, even a bit bratty. The orchestra sounded rich in tone and compellingly vigorous but not entirely consistent.

The ensemble also suffered from the venue, which is too cavernous for a chamber-sized group. All the same, one of the attractions of Mainly Mozart is its willingness to get out of stuffy venues and venture all over the place. Saturday’s program was also played Friday in a hip Tijuana club for what was reported to have been a much more varied audience than the older, formal crowd in Copley. Mozart, this summer, is clearly everywhere.