Mozart had limited regard for the recipients of these symphonies. We know that he openly despised the Parisians, and four years earlier he had perfected an altogether different kind of flippancy in the D major Symphony No. 30, which he had written for his native Salzburg. Mozart is so often sentimentalized by popular taste that it is easy to overlook these demonstrations of contempt for his public and his profession. In the D major Symphony, vacuous chatter, ironically prolonged by a bevy of first and second part repeats, is something that the Salzburg-domiciled composer must enact as well as endure. In the end, his patience wears thin and this teasingly unpleasant little symphony is rounded off with a cruel adolescent gibe: eight bars of utter emptiness.
It is a tribute to James Levine, the Vienna Philharmonic, and Levine's producer, Steven Paul (a musicologist who has specialized in the business of musical jokes), that they do nothing whatsoever to interfere with Mozart's icy wit. The symphony is despatched with all the smart alick precision it deserves.
After this, the VPO turn themselves, with comparable dead-pan wit, into the kind of big band or 'great orchestra' which the Parisians has presented to the 22-year-old Mozart. In this performance of the Paris Symphony everything is brilliantly articulated but the manner is ironically grand and suave. Collectors who hanker after a more characteristically 'Mozartian' reading are missing the point of a performance which brilliantly enacts the character of the piece which Mozart tossed off before retiring to consume a large sorbet in a nearby cafe. (My only regret here is that Levine didn't see fit to include both versions of the slow movement, preferably in succession, to rub salt into French wounds even more obviously.)
The single movement symphony/overture, No. 32, is brilliantly done, their long experience of working together in the opera house shining through at every point in the VPO's playing for Levine. The opera buffa mood is strongly established, and, again, Levine's reading of Mozart's wit suggests a wry subversive, a kind of Austrian Woody Allen.
Competition is not strong at the moment on single CDs in this repertory; nor on LP, though there are several fine rival versions of the Paris Symphony with which Mozartians will be familiar. Harnoncourt on Teldec is perhaps Levine's closest rival. His Concertgebouw recordings are surprisingly large scale and sound a bit like but-toned-up Bruno Walter. There is plenty of drive and sentimental concern from Harnoncourt; but as TH has already noted, Harnoncourt's perigrinations from one style to another are destructive of rhythmic continuity and stylistic consistency. Levine's performances—the opening shots in a projected Mozart symphony cycle—will not please the Mozart hagiographers but they are manifestly readings of high intelligence. No. 30 was recorded a year before its companions, in the same hall but in a different acoustic persepctive which none the less seems well suited to the work's particular character. We shall need a clearer image of the woodwinds in many of the later additions to the series but so far as these works go the present recordings do very nicely.'