Accepting applause after Strauss’ Don Quixote: Carol Cook, Stephanie Sant’Ambrogio, Lachezar Kostov, Jeff Garza, Viktor Valkov, Ilya Shterenberg.
respond
Above: Timothy Jones sings Hugo Wolf songs, with pianist Jeffrey Sykes.
Below: Jeff Garza and Johanna Yarbrough play Verne Reynolds’ Antiphonal Calls III & IV.
23rd Cactus Pear Music Festival
Tradition, transition, luster
incident light
Above: Scott Cuellar speaks to the audience before he joins Sandy Yamamoto, Stephanie Sant’Ambrogio, Lachezar Kostov, and Carol Cook in Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Quintet No. 2.
Left: Artistic director Stephanie Sant’Ambrogio greets the audience.
Below: Ellen dePasquale, Bruce Williams, Jonah Kim, and Scott Cuellar play Saint-Saëns’ Piano Quartet No. 2.
July 24, 2019
The 23rd edition of the Cactus Pear
Music Festival was much like its
predecessors in some ways – as ever,
a mix of familiar and out-of-the-way
chamber music in lustrous
performances by first-class musicians,
some local, some imported, some a
little of each.
New this year was the venue, the
near-downtown Trinity Baptist
Church sanctuary, which turned out
to have an excellent Steinway concert
grand and lively but focused and
well-balanced acoustics ideal for
chamber music.
More important, this was a
transitional season for Cactus Pear. Its
founding artistic director, former San
Antonio Symphony concertmaster
Stephanie Sant-Ambrogio, has
announced her intention to pass the
baton after the 2021 season. The
festival’s board has adopted a
methodical and wise process to choose
her successor. Two candidates have
been identified. One, pianist Scott
Cuellar, served as acting artistic
director for the second week of the
festival just concluded; the other,
pianist Ryo Yanagitani, will fill the
same role next season. Then the
board plans to name one or the other
as artistic director designate, to take
full charge of the 2022 season. Both
are San Antonio International Piano
Competition gold medalists – Mr.
Cuellar in 2016, Mr. Yanagitani in
2009 – and terrific musicians
familiar to Cactus Pear audiences.
In addition to his acting artistic
director duties, Mr. Cuellar
performed on all four of this season’s
concerts, covering classical, romantic,
and modern bases – and confirming
the exemplary impression he had
made in previous appearances. After
his 2017 performance of Liszt’s Piano
Concerto No. 1 with the San Antonio
Symphony under Brett Mitchell, I
praised the pianist effusively for his
technical facility, rhythmic acuity,
and interpretive intelligence. You
could cut and paste those comments
here. I’ll add only that, in everything
he played during this year’s festival,
I found him an uncommonly precise
musician – not only in his accuracy
of execution, but in his way of
matching technical means to musical
purpose.
Cactus Pear’s programming has
always tended to skew toward quirky
(but not especially avant-garde)
choices. Mr. Cuellar continued that
tradition for the two concerts he
programmed.
The festival’s closing work, on July 20,
was Johannes Brahms’ least-often
performed piano quartet, No.2 in A,
in a big, robust performance by
Jeffrey Sykes (piano), Ellen de
Pasquale (violin), Bruce Williams
(viola), and Jonah Kim (cello). That
concert opened with two pieces
by Rebecca Clarke, a British-born
American whose music has made
only a few scattered appearances
hereabouts. Her brief "I bid my heart
be still," for viola and piano (Mr.
Sykes), is a direct, simple statement
in a style that owes much to English
folk idioms. Her Dumka, for violin,
viola, and piano, gets tremendous
mileage from the Ukrainian folk form,
which she expands in structure and advances harmonically into
modernism. Clarke composed this substantial 10-minute work in 1941,
but it wasn’t published until 2004, 25 years after she’d died.
On the same concert, Fryderik Chopin was not represented by music for solo piano, but by the seld0m-heard Sonata in G Minor for cello and piano (Mr. Cuellar). That work unleashed an astonishing, go-for-broke performance by Mr. Kim, whose richly detailed phrasing and dynamics carried the rhetorical weight of a compelling text.
The same, of course, could be said of baritone Timothy Jones, who applied his superb sense of the text to a set of songs by Hugo Wolf on the July 19 concert. Wolf ranks with Schubert and Strauss as a composer of art songs, and he surpassed both in crafting musical lines that express the meanings and inflections of the poems he set – in this concert, two by Goethe and six by Mörike. The latter’s “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag” (An hour before daybreak), a rumination by a lover betrayed, elicits an especially cogent response from Wolf: The vocal lines closely match the rhythms and inflections of natural speech, and the weird harmonic contours evoke the weird borderland between dreaming and wakefulness. Mr. Jones and his collaborator, Mr. Sykes, got deep inside this music. In “Begegnung” (Encounter), although the Mörike poem is couched as a third-person narrative rather than a dialog, Mr. Jones effectively delineated the two characters as a story-teller might, with two distinct voices – deep and full for the boy, thinner and lighter for the girl. Indeed, Mr. Jones’ gift for conceiving art songs as mini-operas without stage sets served all the Wolf songs well. Apart from one or two resistant high notes, his instrument was smooth and lovely as ever.
Ms. dePasquale and Mr. Kim are based on opposite coasts and had never played together before this festival, but they forged a complete unity of sound, style, and purpose in Ravel’s Sonata for violin and cello. They were later joined by Mr. Williams and Mr. Cuellar in a committed and polished account of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Piano Quartet No. 2 in B-flat, a work that is sometimes very strange and nearly always more admirable than lovable.
The festival’s emotional zenith came in the July 13 concert with Dmitri Shostakovich’s final statement, the Sonata in C for viola (Carol Cook) and piano (Mr. Cuellar). The composer completed the score just five days before he died in 1975. Much of the first movement suggests fragility or fading light. The second moves more quickly, but some passages seem curiously immobile, like treading water. The finale repeatedly alludes to the opening movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, as if the music were drifting slowly through fractured fragments of a distant memory. Ms. Cook’s generous and richly textured tone and Mr. Cuellar’s interpretive care made for a stunning performance. Pianist Viktor Valkov opened the concert with an interesting take on the complete Beethoven sonata – he took the familiar first movement at a brisk pace and minimized its gauziness; he brought pointed wit to the Allegretto and tornadic fury to the finale, taken so fast that it seemed almost to fly off the handle.
The same concert also held two works almost contemporaneous with the Shostakovich – Jean Françaix’s Tema con variazioni for clarinet (Ilya Shterenberg) and piano (Mr. Cuellar), shuttling between tart wisecracks and tender lyricism; and American composer Verne Reynolds’ fetchingly atmospheric Antiphonal Calls III & 4 for two horns, beautifully realized by Jeff Garza and Johanna Yarbrough. Both horns returned for the concert’s closer, a gemütlich account of Beethoven’s Sextet in E-flat for two horns and string quartet (Sandy Yamamoto and Ms. Sant-Ambrogio, violins; Ms. Cook, viola; and Lachezar Kostov, cello).
A surprising pleasure on the festival’s opening concert was Richard Strauss’ large-orchestra tone poem Don Quixote, craftily arranged for a mere six players by Laszlo Varga, who had been principal cellist of the New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos and Leonard Bernstein. Mr. Kostov was in his customary brilliant and characterful form representing the idealistic (if delusional) knight. Ms. Cook’s gorgeous playing did well by Sancho Panza. Their colleagues in this taut, spirited performance were Mr. Valkov, Ms. Sant’Ambrogio, Mr. Shterenberg, and Mr. Garza.
The dreamscape of John Harbison’s Twilight Music, by turns expectant and feverish, benefited from Ms. Sant’Ambogio’s warmth and singing line, Mr. Cuellar’s precision, and Mr. Garza’s burnished tone. The concert opened with Franz Schubert’s Quartet Movement in C minor, given
a warm and clearly purposeful account by Ms. Yamamoto, Ms. Sant’Ambrogio, Ms. Cook, and Mr. Kostov. That same contingent, joined by Mr. Cuellar, closed the concert with Gabriel Fauré’s masterful Piano Quintet No. 2 in C minor, harmonically opulent and elusive as a splendid butterfly fluttering just beyond our grasp. I found the ensemble’s traversal of the opening Allegro moderato and the philosophical Andante moderato attenuated in dramatic shape, but the performance was consistently poised and unified. And Mr. Cuellar deserves an OMG for his scintillating execution of the Allegro vivo’s mercurial runs.
Mike Greenberg
music