Conductor Kensho Watanabe.
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November 9, 2019
The symphonic repertoire has few showpieces more familiar than NicolaiRimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.
The music is opulent, kaleidoscopic, almost absurdly melodic. It evokes silken veils, exotic spices, concupiscence. No wonder orchestras play it frequently, and choreographers from Michel Fokine onward have created ballets based on the music and the Arabian Nights tales that inspired it.
All of the score's sensuousness infused the San Antonio Symphony’s superb account of Scheherazade under guest onductor Kensho Watanabe, Nov. 9 in the Tobin Center.
But another aspect of Scheherazade also infused the music, making this performance truly breathtaking. With its large orchestra, its stentorian brass, its many power surges, its intricate interplay of voices requiring close teamwork and strong leadership – but also its many solo passages giving wide scope to free expression – Scheherazade embodies the Industrial Age at apogee. The score is a musical analog to the 19th century’s vast expansion of manufacturing enabled by power machinery, new forms of large-scaleorganization and control – but also the decline of absolute monarchy and the rise of liberal democracy, without which the industrial economy could not operate. Rimsky’s Russia was slow to industrialize, but when Scheherazade was born in St. Petersburg in 1888 the process was well advanced, thanks in large part to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.
All of that, too, was reflected in this performance – in Mr. Watanabe’s turbocharged tempo bursts, in his accents and phrases hurled like lightning bolts, in well-considered details that revealed previously overlooked sinews and muscles in the score’s anatomy. Sensuous, yes, but with an industrial-grade punch. Nothing in this performance seemed fussed over; all of the theatrically astute details seemed instinctual – but, of course, instinct isn’t worth much without technique, and Mr. Watanabe would seem to have that by the truckload. Dispensing with a baton, he communicated his ideas to the orchestra with wonderfully expressive hands and body language.
The orchestra responded with some of its best playing in memory – the luxurious sheen of the strings was especially impressive. Ensemble unity was machine-tooled. All of the principals – with extra bravi for concertmaster Ericc Gratz –brought polished beauty and individuality to their solos.
(One of those soloists was actually the newly appointed assistant principal oboe, Sydney Hancock, sitting in for principal Paul Lueders. Her incredibly lovely tone will bring us much pleasure.)
Mr. Watanabe was sometimes a shade too cautious and square in the diaphanous opening work, Maurice Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite. But his balances and voicings were consistently excellent, and the “Empress of the Pagodas” was a paragon of precision and vigor. The orchestra sounded gorgeous, especially so in the tender, ravishing finale, “The Fairy Garden.”
The concert’s centerpiece was a first-class performance of Bela Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3 (1945), the only Bartók piano concerto to have a firm place in the repertoire. The soloist, Zoltán Fejérvári, shares the composer’s Hungarian culture, and he brought snappy authority to details that reflected Hungarian folk idioms. In the brilliant opening and closing movements, the pianist’s ringing tone and crisp technique delivered the goods while letting the music’s wild spirit show through. He brought a searching quality, tinged with hurt, to the central Adagio religioso. In the finale, his keen sense of the dramatic moment was fully shared by the conductor.
Mr. Fejérvári rewarded the audience’s appreciative cheers with an encore, a personal and supple account of Leoš Janáček’s lyrical “A Blown-Away Leaf” from the collection On An Overgrown Path – included along with In the Mists and the Sonata, 1.X.1905 on a CD the pianist released this past May.
Mr. Watanabe struck out on his own as a free-lance conductor last spring following three seasons as assistant conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. To judge from this concert, he should have a bright future.
Mike Greenberg
Pianist Zoltán Fejérvári
SA Symphony, Kensho Watanabe, Zoltan Fejérvári
Sensuous, with a punch
incident light
music