S.A. Symphony: Frank dazzles, Frautschi sizzles, Berlioz fizzles
May 10, 2008Apart from Gabriela Lena Frank's Three Latin American Dances, a fascinating amalgam of ethnomusicology and modern compositional technique, glisteningly played, the San Antonio Symphony's concert on May 9 was a story of mismatches.
The bold, hip, risk-taking young violinist Jennifer Frautschi was the completely astonishing soloist in the completely unastonishing B Minor Violin Concerto of that staid old formalist Camille Saint-Saens. To close, guest conductor Edwin Outwater redecorated Hector Berlioz's "Symphonie fantastique" with flounces, tchotchkes and garish new paint; the result was the opposite of improvement.
Frank is a youngish American with Lithuanian and Jewish roots on her father's side, Chinese and Peruvian on her mother's. She's done considerable field work exploring indigenous and mestizo South American music and folklore, and she's incorporated that material into music of great coloristic and textural complexity. The early 20th-century model for that synchretistic approach was Bela Bartok in Hungary, and Frank alludes to the relationship in her program note to Three Latin American Dances, composed in 2003.
The title is excessively modest, and misleading. Though much folk material is woven through them, these are not traditional folk dances gussied up for a moden orchestra. They are each highly ambitious original works that also draw from European modernism and New York urban pizzazz: The very beginning of the first piece, a driving "Jungle Jaunt," explictly announces a debt to Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story." That movement and the witty "Mestizo Waltz" frame a "Highland Harawi" of Andean inspiration -- mysterious, otherworldly, suffused with deep emerald colorations.
Frautschi, in her debut with this orchestra, made a superb impression. She's a gutsy musician, given to angular phrasing and rapier-thrust gestures. Her technique was amazing -- click-stop clarity in virtuosic passsages, dead-accurate aim, wide color palette. She produced a substantial, richly grained sound. She brought such intensity and urgency to the Saint-Saens concerto that she almost made me think it had interesting places to go and important things to say. (It doesn't. If it were a car, it would be a Buick, with a reliably cushy ride and some flashy chrome, but neither the horsepower nor the cornering to take it farther than the neighborhood supermarket.)
Outwater had done quite a good job with the Frank piece, and he sculpted Saint-Saens' orchestra nicely. His Berlioz, however, was an ill-conceived, interventionist mess.
Berlioz's psychedelic score, far in advance of its time, is one of the most viscerally exciting in the orchestral repertoire. All a conductor has to do is get the balances and rhythms and tempos right, keep the orchestra together and let 'er rip. Outwater fussed over details, distended phrases as though they were Gumby, inserted accelerandi that made no musical sense, demanded or accepted playing that was too loud and coarse. His rhythms were flabby, his balances careless. (The worst was in the "Scene in the Country," when Brent Ross's elegant offstage oboe was severely overpowered by Hideaki Okada's English horn.) Ensemble was often imprecise.
Mike
Greenberg
