February 5, 2018
The San Antonio Symphony was off last week, and yet it wasn’t. Some of its players showed up for work wearing their Camerata San Antonio and Olmos Ensemble hats. And the YOSA (Youth Orchestras of San Antonio) Philharmonic, many of whose young musicians are taught by symphony players, did a fine job in a challenging program, including a new “P.D.Q. Bach” piano concerto with Jeffrey Biegel the soloist.
We’ll let the kids go first. YOSA Philharmonic music director Troy Peters was at the helm of this Tobin Center concert on Jan. 28. It opened with Leonard Bernstein’s exuberant Candide overture and closed with Zoltán Kodály’s Háry János Suite, neither of which is exactly a walk in the park even for professional orchestras. If the performance of the Bernstein overture wasn’t the last word in ensemble precision – that’s hard to achieve by an oversized roster of 101 players – on the whole the orchestra negotiated the tricky rhythms pretty well. The strings produced a surprisingly mature, clean sound in both Bernstein and Kodály, and there was some very nice solo work in Háry János – top marks go to principal viola Isaac Fuentes from Alamo Heights High School. Guest artist Christopher Deane executed the cimbalom solos with authority.
In between came the new concerto, composed (or “discovered”) by Peter Schickele in his satirical guise as the mythical P.D.Q. Bach. The music in the first and second movements might be described as loosely Mozartian; the third ranges stylistically from Beethoven to boogie-woogie. As one expects from the Bach family’s nutty cousin, the music is punctuated with silly or misplaced bleeps, burps, grunts, quotations, misquotations, track-losings and lacunae. But Mr. Biegel, who organized the consortium of commissioning orchestras and is taking the piece on tour, is such a fine musician he almost defeated the comedy. In the clarity of his lines, the sureness of his touch and the beauty of the sound he elicited from the Steinway, he showed himself to be a true Mozartian.
Before any of the YOSA Phil players were born, Christopher Guzman was one of them. He was a cellist in the orchestra, but his main instrument was piano, and at age 15 (if memory serves) he won YOSA’s annual concerto competition with a revved-up, exuberant account of the first movement of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3. He went on to win prizes in other competitions, including the prestigious Concours International de Piano d’Orléans in France. Now he teaches at Penn State, but he returns home periodically to perform. On Jan 29 he joined the Olmos Ensemble’s wind players (all San Antonio Symphony principals) in a French program in Laurel Heights United Methodist Church.
Some of the pieces on this program were middle-weight and kept Mr. Guzman in a mostly supporting role. But they served to demonstrate the extraordinary abilities of individual Olmos players – horn Jeff Garza in Eugène Bozza’s En Forét, evoking the instrument’s origin as a hunting horn; oboe Paul Lueders in Emile Paladilhe’s Solo de Concert; flute Mark Teplitsky in Philippe Gaubert’s Nocturne and Allegro Scherzando, the first movement ingratiating and lyrical, the second brilliantly virtuosic. More substantial was Camille Saint-Saëns’ Sonata for bassoon (Sharon Kuster) and piano, with stylish playing from both.
Clarinet Ilya Shterenberg chose an unquestioned masterpiece for his vehicle, Claude Debussy’s First Rhapsody for clarinet and piano. Mr. Shterenberg evinced exceptional control and a lovely satin tone, and both he and Mr. Guzman played form deep inside the Debussy style.
The concert opened with a crisp account of Darius Milhaud’s delightful Suite After Corrette for oboe, clarinet and bassoon. The music dips into renaissance harmonies and baroque counterpoint, but the outlook and the gentle dissonances are modern. Wit predominates in its eight short movements – the last evokes a cuckoo.
The finale was Francis Poulenc’s manic-melancholic Sextet for piano and winds, a work the Olmos previously essayed in 1999 and again in 2009, with some differences in personnel. The earlier performances were fine, but this one took the prize for rollicking zest in the (mostly) fast outer movements and for soulful tenderness in the middle movement.
The splendid pianist Viktor Valkov joined Camerata’s core string quartet for the annual “Salon” concert of short, mostly light works, Jan. 28 in the University of the Incarnate Word concert hall.
The big revelation on this program was the opening work, Mexican composer Arturo Márquez’s Homenaje a Gismonti for string quartet. Mr. Marquez is known to American audiences (and to Mexican ones) mainly for his immensely popular Danzón No. 2 for orchestra; his brief Clave Dorada was among the extraordinary series of 14 works the San Antonio Symphony commissioned for its first season in the Tobin Center. Homenaje a Gismonti takes evident inspiration from the intricate counterpoint and propulsive style of the Brazilian composer and guitarist Egberto Gismonti. The piece is a compact, energetic, clearly structured eight minutes long, and its superbly crafted complexity rewards close attention. The first-class string players were Anastasia Parker and Matthew Zerweck (violins), Emily Freudigman (viola) and Ken Freudigman (cello). Mr. Zerweck is a former player with the San Antonio Symphony; the others are currently on the roster.
Mr. Valkov joined the strings in a welcome oddity, Arnold Schoenberg’s satirical Die eiserne Brigade (The Iron Brigade), a musical chronicle of a drunken carouse byAustrian soldiers, composed in 1916, when Schoenberg was one of them. The short piece is cast as a march and trio – based entirely on two military signals – elaborated with vocalizations of military commands and animal sounds.
Mr. Valkov was on his own in a terrific performance – powerful, fearless, piquant – of the Hungarian violinist Franz Vecsey’s Valse triste, originally for violin and piano but played in György Cziffra’s absurdly difficult arrangement for solo piano.
Oh, and there was Toru Takemitsu’s lovely, enterprising arrangement of “Autumn Leaves,” a piano quintet arrangement of excerpts from Manuel de Falla’s El amor brujo,” and much more.
Mike Greenberg
incident light
Olmos Ensemble members and pianist Christopher Guzman prepare to play Poulenc’s Sextet. Below: Pianist Jeffrey Biegel, in a photo by Jerry LoFaro.
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Camerata SA; Olmos Ensemble; YOSA Philharmonic, Jeffrey Biegel