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Music Review

Mozart’s last three symphonies, marvels anew at BSO

Conductor Christoph von Dohnanyi leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra on Thursday.Winslow Townson

It’s a truism that stories with tragic endings often get viewed in reverse, which is to say, the ending colors all that comes before.

Take Mozart. We know what was in store. We’ve seen the movie. And so those three symphonies he composed in the summer of 1788 become not just three astonishingly brilliant works. They become his Final Symphonies.

But the composer, as those pesky mythbusters insist on reminding us, was just 32 when he wrote these works. Far too young for the valedictory, penetrating insights — that view from above the clouds — that we like to (borrowing from a Beethovian template) imagine at the center of a late style. This is actually music of a still-young composer who, two years later, in 1790, would describe himself only then as standing “at the gateway to his fortune.” Harvard scholar Christoph Wolff has used the phrase in the title of an entire book aimed at burning off the fog of future tragedy that has so obscured our view of Mozart’s later works.

The subject is pertinent once more this week as the Boston Symphony Orchestra is performing that sublime trio of celebrated Mozart symphonies: Nos. 39, 40, and 41 (the “Jupiter”). On Thursday night, these masterworks, under the seasoned and no-nonsense baton of Christoph von Dohnanyi, came across with a helpful clarity and welcome freshness that let you marvel at them anew — and on their own terms.

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Tempos were often, but not always, one or two clicks faster than those chosen by James Levine in his live recordings of the first and last of this trio with the BSO, textures more streamlined, the overall sound slightly more lean. Dohnanyi tends to prefer moments of pathos and expressive drama to be elegantly telegraphed rather than emphatically underlined. There were highlights big and small, including the wonderful balance in the finale of No. 39 between instrumental detail and pure onrushing exuberance; the graceful lilt of the woodwind playing in the trio section of the third movement of No. 40; and the quietly glowing strings in the Andante Cantabile of the “Jupiter.” Dohnanyi can make even the smallest details speak.

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Taking a step back, we may do well to recall that only a very few years ago, the BSO’s roster of guest conductors seemed to overflow with veteran maestros hovering around the eight-decade mark. Of that generation, this year, we will hear only from Dohnanyi and Bernard Haitink, who arrives soon. Their visits are to be savored.

More in music:

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A Winged Victory for the Sullen celebrates serendipity

Ty Burr: Stuck in ‘Funkytown’


Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.