Chamber Orchestra of San Antonio
First hearing
October 27, 2012After several years of planning and fund-raising, the Chamber Orchestra of San Antonio presented its inaugural concert on Oct. 25 in the Pearl Stable.
Paul Montalvo, a remarkable fellow who is both a veteran San Antonio firefighter and a conductor, is the organization’s artistic director and cofounder, along with concert pianist Silvia Santinelli and her husband, Robert C. Ehlers. They have attracted some serious financial muscle, including the offer of a $50,000 challenge grant by the Tobin Endowment. The Pearl development provided the venue for the first concert free of charge, somewhat excusing the space's dull acoustic.
COSA assembled 22 musicians -- mostly from Houston, Austin and San Antonio, with a few from elsewhere in Texas and from out of state -- under guest conductor Carlos Izcaray, a product of Venezuela’s famed music education program, El Sistema.
The concert covered an unusually broad range of music and demonstrated the unique role a chamber orchestra can play in a city’s musical landscape. It’s neither a shrunken symphony orchestra nor a magnified chamber group, but a distinct animal with a sizable repertoire appropriate to it alone.
Granted, the most satisfyingly rendered work on the concert was a Modernist landmark that just barely fits into the chamber repertoire, but that hasn’t (to my knowledge) been performed professionally in San Antonio heretofore -- Edgard Varese’s “Octandre” for seven winds plus double-bass.
Varese’s output was sparse, but he was a highly influential pioneer of the avant-garde. His best-known piece is the spacey “Poème électronique,” electronic sounds on tape composed as a sound installation for a pavilion (designed by Corbusier) at the 1958 World’s Fair. His instrumental music is spiky, exploratory and unlike anything that had gone before, but bristling with energy, compact and meticulously constructed. “Octandre” is a tough piece to pull off, but Mr. Izcaray led a brisk, taut, rhythmically precise account that did full justice to the music.
Trumpeter Joe Cooper, situated in the balcony, projected beautiful tone (disregarding one unfortunate clam) in the concert’s opening work, Charles Ives’s “The Unanswered Question,” with strings onstage and woodwinds placed at house left.
Mozart’s Serenade No. 6, scored for strings and timpani divided into two ensembles, came off well, in large measure because of splendid solo work by violinists Quan Jiang (concertmaster) and Long Zhou, both former members of the San Antonio Symphony. Mr. Jiang impressed with three brief but flamboyant cadenzas in the final movement. The fourth and final cadenza was assigned, delightfully, to the timpani, nicely played by Joseph Gonzalez.
Mr. Izcaray’s conducting was little more than workmanlike, and often draggy, in J.C. Bach’s Symphony in E-flat, Op. 9, No. 2; Richard Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll” and Gian Francesco Malipiero’s string-orchestra arrangement of the Sinfonia and Ritornelli from Claudio Monteverdi’s “Orfeo.”
Although the individual players appeared to be generally strong, it is not surprising that they didn’t (except perhaps in the Varese) meld into a unified ensemble for their first concert; it takes time to build an orchestra.
Mike Greenberg
