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June 1, 2014 It is standard procedure for the San Antonio Symphony, like most orchestras, to go on summer hiatus. This summer, however, will be more like a chrysalis.  The orchestra closes its quarter-century runin the Majestic Theatre on June 14 with a special 75th Anniversary Concert with the violinist Joshua Bell.  Then on September 20, with a special concert featuring the soprano Renée Fleming, the orchestra moves into the H-E-B Hall in the new Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, where the auguries indicate an acoustical environment far superior — warmer, more enveloping, more engaging — to the Majestic.  (Granted, the auguries in the land of acoustics are not totally reliable.)  It will almost certainly sound like a different orchestra, and with turnover in key positions it will be a different orchestra, to a degree. Among the changes: The recently appointed (and very young) concertmaster, Eric Gratz, starts his first full season here. Amanda Stewart, who has done splendid work as principal trombone, is moving on to the Saint Louis Symphony. Principal oboe Mark Ackerman and his luscious tone have retired from the orchestra after 39 years.  The new season will connect with the orchestra’s tradition by including a concentration on the music of Richard Strauss, a friend to founding music director Max Reiter. But the orchestra also gains a purchase on the present with a slew of brief commissioned works by a wide gamut of distinguished composers. Music director Sebastian Lang-Lessing sat down with me recently to survey the changing landscape.  One unusual facet of the programming is that the current classical subscription season ends, and the coming season begins, with Gustav Mahler symphonies — the Fifth on June 6 and 7 in the Majestic, the Second (“Resurrection”) on October 10 and 11 in the Tobin Center. Of course, “Resurrection” is thematically appropriate for the move into a new hall, and the Fifth is one of the most powerfully moving symphonies of all time, but Mr. Lang-Lessing also had a pragmatic reason for the pairing — to compare the old and new halls. “We can judge better how to adapt [to the Tobin] with a maxed-out orchestra. It will be a process of fine tuning for us for a couple of years, probably,” he said. New halls nearly always require some adjustment after opening to bring out the best sound. The acousticians will typically alter some design details, and the musicians usually have to play a little differently than they did in their former space. Mr. Lang-Lessing is not worried. “It has to be better acoustics than the Majestic.” The H-E-B Hall has been designed with fixed camera positions and a built-in microphone system to accommodate video recording, increasingly important for orchestras in the Internet age.   The microphone system “won’t be good enough to do a studio recording, but it’s good enough to do much better than we do now for recording.” Mr. Lang-Lessing is making a big effort to connect the orchestra’s present with its origin and early history. The San Antonio Symphony rose quickly to national prominence, in part because of Max Reiter’s friendship with Richard Strauss, the celebrated German composer of brilliantly colorful orchestral tone poems such as “Don Juan” and “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks” and of immensely successful operas such as “Salome” and “Der Rosenkavalier.”  Reiter and the San Antonio Symphony gave the world or US premieres of several Strauss works. The coming season reflects that history in the Renée Fleming concert and in four subscription-series programs. The orchestra also will play for Opera San Antonio’s production of “Salome” on Jan. 8 and 11, with Mr. Lang-Lessing conducting a stellar cast. In addition, Mr. Lang-Lessing hopes to organize a symposium on Strauss.  “It would be helpful, because there’s some controversial thing about Strauss, about him and Nazi Germany. I think it’s important to make sure [people understand] that … his role was something like [Wilhelm] Furtwängler’s role.” That is, Strauss remained in Germany after Hitler’s rise to power, approved of the Nazis’ support for music and cooperated with them on a few occasions. But his relations with the Nazis were strained by Strauss’s professional relationships with Jewish artists, including Stefan Zweig, librettist for “Die schweigsame Frau,” which was first performed in Dresden in 1935 to the consternation of Hitler and his propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels. Reiter, too, was Jewish. Strauss also used his prominence to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law and her family. After the war, he was absolved of any Nazi ties. “We have to open the discussion about it,” Lang-Lessing said. “I think that’s important. We opened up to the Jewish community to see if that would raise any issues. So that would be part of it, the political situation.  “And also the concept of Strauss. His image is not very clear in this country. We have the symphonic Strauss, but we also have the operatic Strauss, which is completely different.”  The Strauss Festival will include music by his contemporaries Ravel and Korngold, and it will also include Mozart, whose operas influenced “Der Rosenkavalier” and later works.  “I think it would exhaust the orchestra if it was all Strauss,” Lang-Lessing said. The works to be played during the festival include some oddities that had their world premieres here under Reiter — the Symphonic Fragment from “Josephslegende,” including material that wasn’t in the original ballet score; and the Symphonic Fantasy from “Die Frau ohne Schatten.” But several of Strauss’s best-known works are also included — “Don Juan,” “Till Eulenspiegel,” “Ein Heldenleben” and the delightful “Burleske” for piano and orchestra, with Michel Dalberto returning as the soloist. 

Sebastian Lang-LessingPhoto: Karin Cooper

Max Reiter

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A chat with Sebastian Lang-Lessing

Season of metamorphosis for SA Symphony 

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Richard Strauss portrait by Max Liebermann

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