Camerata San Antonio:
Tales of beauty, youth, death and life
April 26, 2008When I returned home after Camerata San Antonio's concert on April 25 in Boerne, a candlelight vigil was under way across the street, at the place where a young man had died three nights earlier. The car he was driving hit a speed hump, veered to the right and slammed sideways into a light pole with such force that the pole broke in two and the car folded around it. The youth probably died instantly.
I know nothing about him except for his name and age -- reported in the press as Fernando Yanez, 19 -- and that many people loved him.
The pinnacle of the Camerata concert was a stunning account of Richard Strauss's "Metamorphosen," originally scored for 23 solo strings but presented here in the composer's short score for string septet. Strauss, nearing the end of his life, composed the work in 1945 as an intensely personal lament for the wartime destruction of Germany's opera houses and the culture they represented. The music begins in meditation and closes in mourning, but in between the same somber melodic material is steadily transformed, rising from tenderness to joy, from ecstasy to rapture. Each peak brings a fleeting shudder, a sense of loss. But this is not despairing music. It is balm for all who grieve.
The performance was one to cherish -- lustrous, deep and deeply alive. Several of the musicians have long local track records of consistent excellence -- violinist Ertan Torgul, cellists Kenneth E. Freudigman and David Mollenauer, violist Emily Watkins Freudigman -- but Strauss's score seemed to summon an extra measure of radiance and urgency from all of them. Their less-familiar but first-class colleagus were violinist Kimberley Torgul, violist Robert Meyer and bassist David Dawson.
The concert began with a poised but occasionally imprecise performance of Igor Stravinsky's "Apollon musagète," cut down to one string player per part. The music is from Stravinsky's "neoclassical" period and is characterized by balance, flowing melody and, often, wit, but also intellectual rigor and discipline. Ertan Torgul and Kenneth Freudigman played with particular gorgeousness. They were joined by violinist Karen Stiles, Emily Watkins Freudigman, Mollenauer and Dawson.
A rarity was Dmitri Shostakovich's Two Pieces for String Octet -- Sayaka Okada compleed the violin contigent. It's a mature student work that anticipates some of what the composer would become, especially in the furiosly galloping Scherzo. The preceding Prelude drinks from many waters -- there are hints of Bach, of Brahms, of early Schoenberg -- and one has the sense that the composer's path could have taken him in any of several directions. He wrote the piece when he was 19.
The same age as the unfortunate Yanez, I was thinking, as his young friends placed votive candles on the spot where he had died. A few bent down to pray, and then they all left. An hour later the rain came and put out the candles. Death takes all, but love remains.
Mike
Greenberg
The
program repeats April 27 at 3 p.m. in Travis Park United Methodist
Church, San Antonio.
