SA Symphony with Boyd, Kirshbaum:
A generous Dvorak concerto, a soaring Brahms Third
February 9, 2008The San Antonio Symphony's audience on Friday spent a luxurious evening in the company of cellist Ralph Kirshbaum, guest conductor Douglas Boyd and a standard program played to the hilt.
It would be hard to imagine a more generous account of Antonin Dvorak concerto -- generous both in Kirshbaum's big-hearted, rhythmically free performance and in the huge, lively, open sound of his instrument. (Domenico Montagnana made it in Venice in 1729.) This was personal, high-stakes playing all the way through, and unabashedly Romantic in style: Kirshbaum used portamento without embarrassment, but also without excess. Some might have found Kirshbaum's vibrato a little wide at times, but it generally suited the music. Few would gainsay his subtle dynamic shadings and rich color palette.
Boyd, born in Glasgow and now residing in London, is quickly gaining a major international reputation, with posts in Manchester, Saint Paul and Denver. In his San Antonio debut he passed an acid test of conducting technique and analytical intelligence, Brahms's Symphony No. 3 in F, with flying colors.
It's a hard piece to figure out because there's so much going on -- conflicting rhythms, complex counterpoint, leaping harmonic modulations, interlocking and overlapping phrases, ingenious ideas by the carload. It's the most intricately constructed of Brahms's symphonies, but also possibly the most unified as a total system. It's one of the 19th century's greatest intellectual achievements, and an extension into the realm of music of the systemic complexity that characterized its period -- the layering of vast new communications and transportation systems, the virtuosic complexity of industrial machinery, the intricately engineered steel structures, increasingly large and complex organizations.
And yet the Brahms Third is also, and primarily, music. The trick is to sort through the morass of stuff in the score to find and expose the narrative line, the direction of flow, the gravitational attraction of the final cadence of each movement. All the details have to be expressed, but they can't be allowed to congeal. The reputation for heaviness that Brahms's music has acquired is not a reflection on his scores, but on too many of their interpreters. The score of the Third is indeed dense with detail, but in the same sense that the Eiffel Tower is dense with steel members. The structure soars.
And it certainly did in Boyd's fleet, fluid, rhythmically vital, cleanly delineated account. One could quibble here and there. The performance was too aggressive at times, especially in the finale -- although it was awfully exciting -- and Boyd sometimes pushed the understaffed violins to play louder than they comfortably could. But evidence of intensive study and deep understanding abounded. Brahms's harmonic modulations often were underlined with subtle shifts in tempo or sculpting of phrases. Balances were full but transparent. Boyd had a wonderful way of making those overlapping phrases dovetail -- a trait that also served well the concert's opening piece, Mozart's overture to "The Magic Flute."
The violins didn't sound as smooth and clean as they had last weekend under Christopher Seaman, but they weren't bad. The lower strings had a splendid night, and the brass and woodwinds were radiant.
Mike Greenberg
