Lachezar Kostov

Stephanie Sant’Ambrogio and Ryo Yanagitani

Young Artist Program fellow Emmali Ouderkirk

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Stephanie Sant’Ambrogio, Ryo Yanagitani, Lachezar Kostov and Ara Gregorian played Fauré’s Piano Quartet No. 2. Photos: 5050 Photos  

 July 13, 2016 In its 20th season, the Cactus Pear Music festival is giving greater prominence to its Young Artist Program and its annual competition for young composers. Both of those initiatives produced gratifying results in the two concerts of the festival’s opening weekend, July 8 and 9 in Coker United Methodist Church. Each year the Young Artist Program holds auditions to choose a small group of high school music students (some are home-schooled) for several weeks of intense study with professional musicians, leading to a round of performances at various community venues. This year several YAP alumni, now professionals themselves, are returning to Cactus Pear as mainstage festival artists.  Alumni heard opening weekend were pianist Ellen Pavliska and violinist Colin Sorgi (son of veteran San Antonio Symphony violinist and YAP education director Craig Sorgi). Both contributed nicely to a taut, well-prepared account of Antonín Dvořák’s Piano Quintet in A, which closed the July 8 concert. Ms. Pavliska was a model of clarity and elegance, and she produced lovely tone from the piano. In the first-violin part, Mr. Sorgi sweet high register and warmth down below were pleasurable, although the knife-edged focus of his sound seemed a little odd in the Romantic style. Their splendid colleagues were Cactus Pear artistic director Stephanie Sant’Ambrogio (violin), Ara Gregorian (viola) and — in a most welcome return to San Antonio after moving to the Baltimore Symphony a few months ago — Lachezar Kostov (cello). The same string players assembled on July 9 for Tommy Dougherty’s Propel, Glide, Wind, the winner of last year’s competition for young composers. Mr. Dougherty, a Pittsburgh native, earned his master’s degree last year at Rice University. His six-minute piece for string quartet made a strong impression with its modern idiom, at the edge of tonality and often astringent in its harmonies. The ideas were intelligently conceived and enterprisingly developed. The contrapuntal craft was solid. It held the attention and understayed its welcome. Good work! The 2016 competition, reformulated and renamed the “CPMF X-Prize in Composition,” produced no winner.  The judges, a distinguished lot, were composers Miguel del Aguila, Pierre Jalbert and Roger Zare. Ryo Yanagitani, the gold medalist in the 2009 San Antonio international Piano Competition, fully inhabited Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Quartet No. 2 in G minor (July 8). The pianist’s flexible tempi and billowing dynamics perfectly suited the late-Romantic French style. Ms. Sant’Ambrogio, Mr. Gregorian and Mr. Kostov were all in top form, collaborating in a performance that was always in motion, rhythmically alive and clear in its direction. And was that an OMG glance that Ms. Sant’Ambrogio cast toward Mr. Kostov when he imbued a single sustained note in the adagio with a whole novel’s worth of feeling? Mr. Yanagitani was the pianist again in a robust account of Brahms’s Piano Quintet in F minor, which closed the July 9 concert, and he was the sensitive partner to Ms. Sant’Ambrogio in the work that opened the festival on  July 8, Kevin Puts’s mournful Aria (Aria). The violinist dedicated the latter work “to those who have lost their lives” in a week of horrific killings by and of police. Pivoting between grief and anger, with wide melodic leaps tugging at the heart, this brief work seemed altogether appropriate for the moment.  Soviet Armenian composer Arno Babadjanian’s Trio in F-sharp minor (1952) for piano (Ms. Pavliska), violin (Ms. Sant’Ambrogio) and cello is not, apart from its soulful slow movement, a very interesting piece. (It’s an example of the anachronistic, don’t-scare-the-commissars, folk-oriented Romanticism that Stalin approved.)  But Ms. Sant’Ambrogio evidently found inspiration in it — her tone, always beautiful and warm, was startlingly so in this piece on July 9.  Despite their excellent performances separately, Mr. Yanagitani and Ms. Pavliska partnered for a strangely inert, often metronomic account of Franz Schubert’s reflective Fantasie in F minor for piano four hands (July 8). Most of its feeling was left on the page. This year’s YAP crop numbers eight musicians — two pianists, five string players and one bassoonist. The last, Emmali Ouderkirk, a student of San Antonio Symphony principal bassoon Sharon Kuster, displayed excellent facility and tone in Eugène Bourdeau’s Bassoon Solo No. 1, on July 9. Her able partner was pianist Rhiannon Bishop, a student of Kenneth Thompson. Mike Greenberg Cactus Pear continues with a mostly-French program on July 15 and a concert of Modern and post-Modern works (including a commissioned work by Kevin Puts) on July 16. Both concerts are at Coker United Methodist Church at 7 pm. The July 16 program is also presented on July 14 at 7 pm at the McKenna Event Center in New Braunfels; and July 17 at 2 pm at the First United Methodist Church in Boerne. .

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