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A keeper
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Above: Pianist Scott Cuellar. Below: The balcony of the H-E-B Performance Hall a few seconds before the lights went down for the start of the San Antonio Symphony’s concert on Nov. 10.
November 11, 2017
The week began with Camerata San
Antonio’s superb accounts of French and
Spanish string quartets; it ended with the San
Antonio Symphony debut of the young pianist
Scott Cuellar, who served up a glisteningly
executed, intelligently shaped performance of
Franz Liszt’s Concerto No. 1.
Brett Mitchell, now in his rookie season as
music director of the (Denver) Colorado
Symphony, was the guest conductor for the
Nov. 10 concert, which opened with Liszt’s
Les Préludes and closed with Aaron
Copland’s Symphony No. 3.
The Tobin Center’s H-E-B Performance Hall
was shamefully underpopulated for the
occasion on Nov. 10, perhaps because of
competition from Luminaria, the big arts
bash that was holding forth concurrently at
HemisFair. Well, that’s a convenient excuse,
anyway. A coup by the symphony’s major
funders last summer led to the replacement
of the board and management, which had
been deemed ineffective. But the only visible
change under the lew regime has been a
marked increase in empty seats.
Mr. Cuellar was the gold medalist in the 2016
San Antonio International Piano Competition.
Reared in Minneapolis and educated at
Oberlin and Juilliard, he now is a doctoral
candidate at Rice University’s Shepherd
School of Music. In an appearance with the
Cactus Pear Music Festival last summer, he
showed a strong affinity with the Romantic
repertoire, and he confirmed that impression
in his accounts of the Liszt concerto and his
encore, Liszt’s “Widmung,” based on the
Schumann song.
To be sure, Mr. Cuellar’s Romanticism is not of the gauzy, touchy-feely type. His playing in this concert evinced the Classical traits of clarity and precision. But the technical facility that enabled him to execute such astonishingly clean 32nd-note runs and cavorting octaves also enabled him to give those figures shape and point and both structural and affective meaning. His rhythmic acuity and impeccable timing served to accentuate the flexibility of the musical line and to make it more expressive and personal, not less. His “Widmung" was wonderfully free and alive and colorful, but always true to the page. Mr. Cuellar is a keeper, and one hopes to hear much more from him. (He is scheduled to give a solo recital in Fredericksburg, courtesy of the Fredericksburg Music Club, on March 18, 2018.)
Liszt composed the pioneering symphonic poem Les préludes in 1848 (and revised it six years later) but this grandiose piece entered American popular culture in 1940 when its main theme was used as the opening music for each episode of the movie serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. The following year, in Germany, the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels commissioned an arrangement of the fanfare theme to be used in official newsreels about German victories in the war. (Spoiler alert: Germany lost.) That circumstance made Les Préludes an interesting bookend to the Copland Third Symphony, a 1946 work that breathes American air, dances to American rhythms and expresses American toughness, simplicity and optimism. (Remember American optimism?) It was composed by a gay Jew from Brooklyn – the sort of fellow the Nazis would have sent to the gas chamber.
In both orchestral works, Mr. Mitchell got lovely, finely balanced playing from the string choir, though in the finale of Les Préludes the brass overwhelmed the strings. Ensemble was a little loose at times in both works – that’s not surprising under a guest conductor who’s new to the orchestra – but in the Copland all except the boisterous second movement flowed nicely. All the woodwind principals made first-class contributions to the Copland finale.
(Les Préludes, by the way, was a late replacement for the work originally scheduled, a world premiere of a competition-winning piece that was deemed “unplayable.” Another major orchestra also scrubbed it.)
We’ve been privileged to hear many of the most acclaimed globe-trotting string quartets over the years, thanks to the San Antonio Chamber Music Society – and even more privileged to have Camerata San Antonio’s core string quartet in our midst, playing for us several times a year. These folks can go toe-to-toe with the best – violinists Anastasia Parker and Matthew Zerweck, violist Emily Freudigman and cellist Ken Freudigman.
Camerata’s program on Nov. 5 held the sole string quartets of two French masters, Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy, and by the French-influenced Spaniard Joaquin Turina. The Fauré was especially welcome: Composed just before he died in 1924, it is one of his finest achievements, an engrossing essay in slippery tonality, dense textures and complex counterpoint.
The performances were consistently vigorous, unified, smartly detailed and sonically lustrous. But most impressive was the ever-clear sense of direction, the inexorable momentum that carried the listener from start to finish, especially in Fauré and Debussy. The Turina piece, with one foot in Spanish folk idioms and one in Debussy, and a bit of Chausson for good measure, was less amenable to a clear arc, but still pleasurable.
The recording equipment visible at this concert emboldens us to hope that Camerata will release a recording of the Fauré and Debussy quartets, at least.
Only one minor complaint: Either the electronic enhancement in the University of the Incarnate Word’s concert hall was set too high or my ears were temporarily hyper-sensitive.
Mike Greenberg
San Antonio Symphony; Brett Mitchell, Scott Cuellar; Camerata San Antonio