Olmos Ensemble
A chemistry lesson, in French
November 5, 2009Chemistry is the great imponderable in music. Put these five or six musicians together and you might get an agreeable performance. Change one or two players in the same pieces, and you might get singed eyebrows and a big smile on your face.
In previous seasons the Olmos Ensemble has given quite good accounts of Francis Poulenc’s Sextet for Piano and Winds (in 1999) and Darius Milhaud’s “La cheminée du roi René” (in 2001). With a few changes in personnel, the Olmos revisited those French interwar works on Nov. 3 in First Unitarian-Universalist Church. What had been quite good became memorably delicious. The chemistry had changed.
Like much of Poulenc’s music, his Sextet for Piano and Winds alternates between brash, insouciant wit and sincere, yearning lyricism. The first of its three movements carries contrast to an extreme. It opens with an explosive, madcap frenzy, but the piano introduces a tender, balladlike middle that attains real depth before the bustle presses in again. The effect is rather like walking down a crowded, noisy city street, ducking into a quiet old church for a moment’s prayer, and then returning to the fray.
The performance was near perfection, an adrenalin rush in spirited passages, warmly silken in reflective moments, precise and polished all the way through. The decade since the previous performance had brought clarinetist Ilya Shterenberg and hornist Jeff Garza into the Olmos core membership -- and into the San Antonio Symphony, where both are principal players -- and they are among the best in the business. Moreover, for this performance the Olmos had the services of pianist Brent Watkins, who moved to San Antonio a few years ago while pursuing his doctorate in music at the University of Texas at Austin. Watkins was fully attuned to both sides of Poulenc. The pianist pounced with feral abandon on the opening statement, and he brought fine Romantic feeling to the first movement’s central section. The longtime Olmos veterans -- oboist Mark Ackerman, flutist Tal Perkes and bassoonist Sharon Kuster -- were all in top form. But more remarkable than the individual musicianship was the way these six players melded into a unit.
The winds stood on equally high ground in Milhaud’s charming suite of seven short movements in neo-Renaissance style. This music requires, and got, carefully balanced chords, impeccable intonation and a buoyant state of mind. The only personnel change since the 2001 performance was Garza, but his centered, lively tone made a big difference.
The concert opened less winningly with Aram Khachaturian’s Trio for violin (Renia Piotrowski-Shterenberg), clarinet and piano. There was little to complain about technically, but the musicians didn’t seem altogether comfortable with the work’s elaborately filigreed Armenian folk character.
William Ross of San Antonio was both the composer and the pianist in his “Sonata Lirica II” for oboe and piano. The first movement’s stretched-tonal Modernism was attractive, and the middle movement’s melodic line for the oboe was lovely, meandering freely but with a clear sense of direction. The idea machine flagged, however, in the finale, three of whose four variations (on a hymn tune by Herbert Howells) were too similar in character.
Mike
Greenberg
