Cactus Pear Music Festival
Mastering the style, and transcending it
July 9, 2012The young Canadian pianist Ryo Yanagitani first came to local notice in 2009, when he took the gold medal in the San Antonio International Piano Competition. He’s returned several times since then as a recitalist, as a soloist with the San Antonio Symphony and as a collaborator in chamber music. On each visit he’s grown in his natural musicality, his seeming ease at the keyboard and his way of communicating that the music is about something more than just sound.
Mr. Yanagitani showed continued growth when he returned once again to participate in the first two programs of the 2012 Cactus Pear Music Festival, July 5 and 7 in Coker United Methodist Church.
His collaborators in most of the music were an elite crew of string players -- violinist and Cactus Pear founder Stephanie Sant’Ambrogio, violist Aloysia Friedmann and cellist Dmitri Atapine. The pianist also gave supple support to the splendid baritone Timothy Jones in a generous set of Richard Strauss songs, centerpiece of the July 7 concert.
Mr. Yanagitani’s most deeply satisfying work came in Mozart’s Quartet in G Minor, which opened the July 5 program. He proved to be an ideal Mozartean. His touch was light but clear, his phrasing free and lyrical, his enunciation crisp. The style was right. Style can be a prison, of course, but Mr. Yanagitani was no prisoner. Absolutely nothing in his performance was generically Mozartean. He probed beneath the style to convey the specific meaning -- the sensuality, the wit, the vulnerability, the human story -- of every phrase.
In another piano quartet in G Minor, by Johannes Brahms, Mr. Yanagitani impressed with the liveliness of his line and his full internalization of Brahms’s voluptuous large-scale rhythms. He rode the music as a surf-boarder rides a wave, the two fused into a single unit.
Mr. Jones, a former San Antonio resident and still a frequent visitor, was in top vocal and interpretive form in his Strauss set. which included essential masterworks in serious mode such as “Zueignung” and “Morgen!” along with less-familiar examples of Strauss’s vivacity and wit. He opened with “Ruhe, meine Seele” in an extremely slow tempo that suited the text and demonstrated a degree of breath control that most singers would envy. His highest notes required some technical cunning, but the upper end of his natural voice was limpid and youthful, and his low notes were magisterial. As always, he bridged the stylistic worlds of Lieder and opera, mastering the former’s sense of the text and the latter’s sense of theater. He showed a particular affinity for the comedic in “Schlechtes Wetter” and “Herr Lenz.”
The Strauss set was dedicated to the memory of baritone Frank Christian, for many years a stalwart of local opera and musical theater. His riveting Sweeney Todd remains one of the high points of my theater-going experience.
The acoustics of the Coker sanctuary, Cactus Pear’s home since 2010, are not very kind to strings. Individual players in exposed passages can sound OK, if somewhat lacking in presence, but even a slight increase in traffic results in sonic congestion. Accented notes are diminished in force: The Gypsy rondo that closes the Brahms G-minor quartet was less exciting than it should be.
On the whole the strings sounded best when the piano was out of the equation, in Beethoven’s String Trio in G. The performance was taut, energetic and lithe. Ms. Sant’Ambrogio and Mr. Atapine, joined by Mr. Yanagitani, were heard to good effect in Franz Schubert’s Trio No 2 in E-flat. Mr. Atapine’s light but firm step and pointed, expressive phrasing were especially winning.
The July 7 program opened with two seldom-heard early works by Richard Strauss for piano quartet -- the charming “Liebeslidchen,” with an ascending melody that prefigures the composer’s mature style; and the fiery “Arabische Tanz.” Ms. Sant’Ambrogio, leading the latter in her low register, was terrific -- piquant, fearless and seductive.
Mike Greenberg
