Rachel Ferris Photo: Susan Riley

The Olmos Ensemble has begun posting audio-only recordings of selected pieces (or individual movements) from recent concerts to YouTube, with excellent sound quality. Click here. 

respond

October 29, 2015 A few minutes into Maurice Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro, as performedwith great polish and verve on an Olmos Ensemble concert of French music, Oct. 26, a thought occurred to me: This is why the San Antonio Symphony plays so much better than its humble budget might suggest.  All 10 of the musicians playing this concert were members of the symphony, as are most of the core players for several other local chamber-music outfits. (A few players are former symphony musicians.) Most of the symphony’s principals and a good number of section players frequently play chamber music with their colleagues. The teamwork and mutual trust they nurture in chamber music carries over to  the symphony.  The personnel for this concert in First Unitarian Universalist Church included four Olmos regulars — Martha Long (flute), Ilya Shterenberg (clarinet), Sharon Kuster (bassoon), and Jeff Garza (horn) — plus guests Bonnie Terry and Eric Siu (violin), Beth Breslin (viola), Lachezar Kostov (cello), David Milburn (bass) and Rachel Ferris (harp).  Ms. Ferris was the stylish rudder for Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro (for harp, flute, clarinet and string quartet) and his Sonatine en Trio (for flute, viola and harp), the latter an arrangement by harpist Carlos Salzedo of Ravel’s Sonatine for solo piano. In both works the harpist conveyed the subtly shifting balance between objectivity and voluptuousness that is central to Ravel’s style.  (Think of the way a native Parisian can inspire passion just by reciting from a plumbing supply catalog.) In this there was no real surprise: Ms. Ferris had given a superb performance of the Introduction and Allgro for the 2007 Cactus Pear Musci Festival.  Her Olmos colleagues gave her a crystalline surround in the Introduction and Allegro. The Sonatine en Trio afforded the evening’s fullest exposure for Ms. Breslin’s luscious viola tone and shapely phrasing; she is now in her second season with the symphony, but this concert was my first hearing of her work in chamber music. The concert opened with Louis Dauprat’s Quintet No. 3 in E-flat for Horn and Strings, from a set of three he composed between 1813 and 1819. Depurate was a virtuoso on the natural horn and a fairly active composer for that instrument. Mr. Garza, playing a modern valved horn, got a couple of uncharacteristic clams out of the way early on and then delivered a splendid performance in music that covers the extremes of the instrument’s range and requires great stamina. Apart from providing a showcase for the horn, the music was not especially memorable — generically classical in style, with too much busywork in the string parts.  Over the years, the Olmos Ensemble has essayed a good number of Jean Françaix’s witty and meticulously crafted chamber works. This time, it was the Octet for clarinet, bassoon, horn, string quartet and bass. If the instrumentation sounds familiar, that’s because it matches Franz Schubert’s Octet in F (heard locally on Oct. 11 in a top-notch performance by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble). The violinist and conductor Willi Boskovski commissioned the work to open a 1972 Vienna Octet concert that also included the Schubert. Françaix dedicated his Octet to the “revered memory” of Schubert, whose lyricism may be alluded to in the bluesy, ballad-like introduction to the otherwise jocular first movement and in the tender third. The finale, a supremely silly, over-the-top waltz (punctuated with individual notes that sound like sudden expulsions of gas from a mammalian posterior orifice, or perhaps a party horn) evidently honors Boskovsky’s long leadership of the Vienna New Year’s concerts.  The performance was crisp, spirited and agile throughout.  On Oct. 25, Camerata San Antonio presented its annual recital program featuring a member of that ensemble — in this case, violinist Anastasia Parker, known until her recent marriage as Anastasia Storer. Her excellent piano collaborator was Vivienne Spy. The venue was the new concert hall at the University of the Incarnate Word.  The idea behind the Camerata recitals is that the featured musician gets to play whatever she desires. Ms. Parker (also a San Antonio Symphony musician) chose an unusually eclectic program, beginning in 17th-century Austria with the unaccompanied Passacaglia that forms the rather severe capstone to Heinrich Biber’s set of “Mystery” Sonatas and ending in 20th-century Denmark-meets-Argentina  with Jacob Gade’s erotically charged “Jalousie.” In between came some Brahms (the Violin Sonata in G) and Bartok (The Violin Rhapsody No. 1).  For the Biber, Ms. Parker played a baroque instrument lent for the occasion by Terra Nova Violins. She impressed with accurate intonation, firm tone and snappy execution of ornamented passages, and her historically appropriate non-vibrato technique was coupled with nice shading of dynamics. The performance may have been on the dry side, too strict in meter, but Biber’s music does invite that approach.  At home on her own violin, Ms. Parker brought a lovely vibrato, sweet tone and winning warmth to the Brahms sonata, though I found her phrasing too matter-of-fact. She was more engaging in the Bartok rhapsody, whose rustic allusions and wit came across clearly, and which showed off both her gleaming high register and her insinuating low notes.  Oh, and there was a delicious novelty, three selections from “Fables from Aesop,” by American composer Howard J. Buss. They are scored for the unusual combination of violin and trombone, the latter played by Senior Airman Jaime Parker, a member of two Air Force bands and a former lead trombonist with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.  The players recited each of the three fables (“The Camel Who Wanted Horns,” “The Crow and the Pitcher” and “The Dog Who Chased a Lion”) before playing the relevant music, brief sketches in a neoclassical style characterized by sophisticated simplicity. The pieces were like children’s songs or nursery rhymes at their core, but the melodies and harmonies took unexpected turns. After the spirited performance Ms. Parker and Mr. Parker departed the stage hand-in-hand, as though they were husband and wife, which, in fact, they are.  Mike Greenberg   

Anastasia Parker

Olmos Ensemble, Camerata San Antonio

Taking bows after Jean Françaix’s Octet. Photo from the Olmos Ensemble’s Facebook page

Team-building, in music and marriage

incident light

The Crow and the Pitcher Illustration, 1919, by Milo Winter

music