Camerata with Ken-David Masur:
The conductor sings, beautifully
February 25, 2008
Ken-David Masur, the San Antonio Symphony's new resident conductor, has a parallel musical life as an emerging baritone, a student of the estimable Thomas Quasthoff. To judge from a hastily arranged appearance Sunday with Camerata San Antonio, Masur is emerging quite nicely.
Masur and his wife, pianist Linda Lee Masur, stepped in to replace soprano Susan Lorette Dunn, who fell ill last week with a throat infection. In songs by Robert Schumann, Othmar Schoeck and Benjamin Britten, the baritone projected a pure, highly placed lyric instrument with a warm caramel color and velvety texture. The pursuit of sonic beauty too often trumped an emotional connection with the text, however, especially in the Schumann set, which included four pieces from "Dichterliebe." Consonants were a little blurry, most noticeably in English, in Britten's "Down by the Salley Gardens." As can be expected of a young singer, Masur doesn't exploit the full arsenal of expressive tools, but his very beautiful instrument, especially at the high end, gives him a solid foundation. And in Melinda Lee Masur he has a very flexible and sensitive partner.
A string quartet (violinists Karen Stiles and Annie Chalex Boyle, violist Emily Watkins Freudigman and cellist Kenneth Freudigman) opened the concert with a warm performance of Antonin Dvorak's "Cypresses," an instrumental arrangement of 12 songs of unrequited love, from the composer's mid-20s. The best of these richly melodic pieces are carefully wrought dramatic structures that ride an emotional roller-coaster, but too much is fusty and overstuffed, and the overall impression is too much of the same thing. More winning on all counts were the quartet's lively, smartly shaped accounts of Andon Webern's plush "Langsamer Satz" and Hugo Wolf's sprightly little "Italian Serenade."
Mike Greenberg
