SA Symphony with Campestrini, Sant'Ambrogio:
Moments of truth, and beauty
April 5, 2008There's an easy way to gauge a performance of Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique" Symphony. Just see what percentage of the audience breaks into riotous applause the moment the third movement comes to its giddy, triumphant end. If some listeners are already headed for the doors when gloom descends with the weeping despair of the finale, all the better.
By that measure, guest conductor Christoph Campestrini and the San Antonio Symphony delivered a very successful performance indeed on Friday night in the Majestic Theater.
Few in the audience could have been unfamiliar with Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony and with the fact that joy, in this work, is spurious and short-lived. But through the first three movements Campestrini had dragged the audience -- and, I suspect, the orchestra as well -- out of its comfort zone with a performance that was so aggressive, so manic, even at times so garish, that it was hard not to fall into the trap the composer (and life) had set, and to fall willingly.
This was not a beautiful performance. I don't think it was meant to be beautiful, but to be truthful. Though there were moments of crystalline lucidity, sometimes Campestrini's tempos in the first three movements seemed calculated to be just a little too fast to allow ensemble precision, his dynamics just a little too loud to allow polished surfaces. There were more than a few sloppy attacks. The orchestra often sounded on edge. The music sounded disturbed, neurotic -- as it should. The seamless fluidity of Campestrini's lyrical line, a constant throughout this concert, curiously heightened the emotional violence. It was like a locomotive effortlessly slicing through a bus stalled on the tracks.
Some of that same sensibility informed Benjamin Britten's Four Sea Interludes from the opera "Peter Grimes," although here Campestrini's seamlessness sometimes wanted more punctuation. The roiling "Storm" was very nicely put together and crisply played.
For the concert's centerpiece, the orchestra's much-beloved former concertmaster, Stephanie Sant'Ambrogio, returned to town as soloist in Henryk Wieniawski's Violin Concerto No. 2 in D Minor. Sant'Ambrogio impressed with a generous, warm tone, sultry low register and firm highs. In the slow movement's long-lined melody, she unleashed gorgeous playing, with a detailed expressiveness that implied a love song. No surprise in any of that. But Sant'Ambrogio, not a musician I usually associate with flash and dazzle, also did full justice to the speed-demon pyrotechnics of the finale.
Mike Greenberg
