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The view from the studio theater lobby
Studio theater lobby
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Chamber Orchestra of San Antonio
Carlos Izcaray conducts Chamber Orchestra of San Antonio in Tobin Center’s Carlos Alvarez Studio Theater.
Music from ‘Carmen,’ with a twist, inaugurates Tobin Center's Alvarez Studio Theater
incident light
September 7, 2014
The Tobin Center was running on all cylinders Saturday night, with capacity crowds for Jason Mraz in the 1,759-seat H-E-B Performance Hall; for a free concert by Nina Diaz, Lonely Horse and David Garza in the outdoor River Walk Plaza, with a stated capacity of 600; and for the Chamber Orchestra of San Antonio in the Carlos Alvarez Studio Theater, said to have a capacity of 230, but able to accommodate only 180 for this concert. Even Sebastian Lang-Lessing, the music director of the San Antonio Symphony, couldn’t get in.
COSA fielded an orchestra of 22 string players and five percussionists for this concert, the first public event in the Tobin’s studio theater. The guest conductor, as at COSA’s inaugural concert in 2012, was Carlos Izcaray, a product of Venezuela’s famed El Sistema music education program.
The program, dubbed “An Iberian Epic,” ran to the uncommon, though it opened in fairly familiar territory with Joaquin Turina’s “La oración del torero,” originally composed for a lute quartet. Much less well-known in this country was the Concerto for Strings by Joly Braga Santos, the most important Portuguese composer of the 20th century. After intermission came the Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin’s “Carmen Suite,” a modernist, often witty reconsideration of music from George Bizet’s opera, with interpolations from “L’Arlésienne” and “The Fair Maid of Perth.”
Braga Santos’s Concerto for Strings is conservative for its time (1951). As in other early works by the composer, it draws on his country’s Renaissance tradition. For that reason the music in the first two movements (both of them elegiacal and deeply felt) sometimes recalls Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis or Paul Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler,” though a brief passage in the trudging second movement suggests the chromaticism of Gustav Mahler’s late period. The third movement is a lively folk dance.
Shchedrin composed his “Carmen Suite” as a ballet score. And make no mistake — despite the familiar source material, it is very much Shchedrin’s music. Bizet’s original “The Changing of the Guard,” for example, is a steady march with a prominent triangle part. Shchedrin breaks up the rhythm, giving the guards two (or three or four) left feet, and adds a whole catering kitchen of percussion.
Mr. Izcaray showed far more sympathy for Shchedrin’s “Carmen Suite” than he had shown for Bizet’s “Carmen” two years earlier in an Opera Theater of St. Louis production, which moved slowly and with little rhythmic urgency. His COSA début also was bothered by draggy tempos. But on Saturday everything moved nicely, with crisp rhythms, rightly gauged flexibility and ample energy.
The orchestra was generally secure and nimble, though with brief patches of iffy intonation and imprecision — not surprising given that the players haven’t really had the time to build a cohesive ensemble. Solo work from principals, especially from violist Matt Diekmann, consistently excelled.
The acoustics in the studio theater, its walls lined with panels desiged for a balance of reflection and absorption, were a little dry and unforgiving for a chamber orchestra, but the lower strings did excite some resonance. The sound was nicely balanced, neither too bright nor too dark.
Mike Greenberg