The San Antonio Symphony and music director Sebastian Lang-Lessing take bows following Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony in the Tobin Center on Jan. 13. Below: Mezzo-soprano Veronica Williams in San Fernando Cathedral in October, 2017.
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Remembering Dr. King
music
January 13, 2018
It was by virtue of exceptional performances
behind the scenes that the San Antonio
Symphony, under music director Sebastian
Lang-Lessing, was able to give an exceptional
performance – or any performance at all, for
that matter – on stage at the Tobin Center on
Jan. 12.
In the wake of an aborted putsch led by Tobin
Endowment chair J. Bruce Bugg, the
symphony board had voted Jan. 3 to curtail
the season five months early for lack of funds,
but the day following that vote the board
chair resigned and Kathleen Weir Vale
stepped in. She led the board to reverse
course in time to rescue the Jan. 12-14
concerts. Then she backed up her can-do
attitude by raising a bunch of money from
private donors, persuading the city and
county governments to up their game, and
reaching an agreement with the musicians to
continue their expired contract through the
end of the season – with a $30 weekly bump
to enable the symphony to make archival
concert recordings available to the public
online. Oh, and she brought former general
manager Karina Bharne back to become the
chief executive, to cheers from the musicians.
Now the bulk of the season is back on track,
though two classical series programs (Feb.
2-3 and April 6-7) appear to be cancelled and
the repertoire for two others will be altered.
Would all that excitement in the background
make the reprieved Jan. 12 concert an
anticlimax? Happily, no. The program, to be
repeated Jan. 13 at 8 and Jan. 14 at 2, was a
commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr., the great civil rights leader. The concert
opened with two works that explicitly honor
King’s legacy – the third movement from
“Duke” Ellington’s The Three Black Kings
and Jospeh Schwantner’s New Morning for
the World (Daybreak of Freedom), whihc
incorporates spoken excerpts from King’s
writings and speeches. The closer was
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, Eroica.
Even before the orchestra filed in, magic happened. Mezzo-soprano Veronica Williams stepped into a spotlight on the darkened stage and sang the African-American spiritual “Lord, How Come Me Here?” to thrilling and devastating effect. She’d made an indelible impression in the same piece last October during a Musical Bridges Around the World concert in San Fernando Cathedral, but this performance struck me as even deeper and more intense than the earlier one.
Ms. Williams also was the firm, clear, convicted speaker of Dr. King’s lines in the Schwantner piece. (Strangely, her name was not mentioned in the program.) The music is densely textured and iridescent, portentous with heavy brass and lots of percussion in the early and late going, but with some lovely elegiacal writing for strings in the middle. The structure, closely resembling Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait, more or less precludes its being a unified musical work. The orchestral episodes serve mainly as elaborate atmospheric cartouches framing the spoken words. But the individual moments are fetching and at times engrossing, and all that percussion seems especially apt for the thematic purpose: Percussion instruments are repeatedly struck and beaten, but they are tough and hard, and they endure. The taut, polished orchestral playing combined with the Tobin’s exceptional acoustics to produce an immersive performance.
The Three Black Kings, originally intended as a ballet score, was Ellington’s final work, and he left it unfinished when he died in 1974. His son Mercer Ellington completed it and Luther Henderson orchestrated it. Although the program listed all three movements, the first two – representing King Balthazar of the Magi and King Soloman – were not played. That’s a shame because the three together give a more rounded view of Ellington’s genius. The Martin Luther King movement is in a sweet, languid style reminiscent of Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady,” but it calls for some hot jazz solos, nicely turned out by principal trumpet John Carroll and principal trombone Steve Peterson.
The performance of Beethoven’s Eroica was surprising in some ways. Contrary to Mr. Lang-Lessing’ usual practice, dynamics were compressed and shifted a peg downward – fortissimos in the score came off as mere fortes. The resulting lighter mass of this performance, together with its transparency and the utter clarity of all voices, came remarkably close to emulating the sound of a classical-era orchestra, with its gut strings and natural winds.
Too, the performance situated the work more in the classical style than at the cusp of romanticism. The opening allegro leaned toward a placid lyricism rather than the high voltage intensity one might have expected, though the brisk tempo was right on the money. The funeral march was deeply felt, but it moved with a fairly light step. The scherzo was crisply played and tightly controlled.
Mr Lang-Lessing brought forth considerable oomph and wit in the finale, but even here seemed more focused on a beautiful, integrated orchestral sound than in dramatic intensity. One can’t really blame him: This season for the first time the orchestra has been able to consistently achieve a level of refinement that any conductor would relish. If you got it, flaunt it.
Mike Greenberg
San Antonio Symphony, Sebastian Lang-Lessing, Veronica Williams