Angel Romero
incident light
Viet Cuong
respond
Vigor, finesse on guitar, and in the orchestra
music
May 20, 2017
The distinguished guitarist Angel Romero
returned to town after too long an absence to
help the San Antonio Symphony close its
season with a reference-standard performance
of Joaquin Rodrigo’s Fantasia para un
gentilhombre. That fragrant 1954 work was
the centerpiece of a loosely Iberian-themed
concert conducted by music director
Sebastian Lang-Lessing, May 19 in the Tobin
Center.
Mr. Romero was just 21 years old in 1967
when he recorded two other Rodrigo works
with this orchestra under Victor Alessandro
on the Mercury label — the Concierto de
Aranjuez, which he came to virtually own;
and, with brothers Pepe and Celin and father
Celedonio, the Concierto Andaluz, which had
its world premiere here.
On the evidence of his performance of the
Fantasia, in effect a four-movement concerto,
the intervening decades have been kind to Mr.
Romero’s technique. The rich tone, the
astonishingly even runs, the wide color
palette, the combination of vigor and finesse
were all fully apparent – without amplification, thanks to the H-E-B Performance Hall’s superb acoustics. Especially ingratiating were passages in which the guitar engaged in delicate conversation with a splendid quintet of winds – Mark Teplitsky (flute), Julie Luker (piccolo), Paul Lueders (oboe), Sharon Kuster (bassoon), and Lauren Eberhart (trumpet). For his encore, Mr. Romero offered one of his father’s own brilliant fantasias, a blaze of instrumental color.
Orchestras usually need a few years to adjust to a new hall, especially when moving from a dry, stingy acoustic (the Majestic Theater) to a resonant, generous one. I can say with a high degree of confidence that the San Antonio Symphony successfully completed the transition this past winter, in the middle of its third season in the Tobin Center, and has maintained a consistently rich, transparent, well-balanced sound since then.
The optimum matching of musicians and acoustics was perfectly illustrated by the work that closed this concert, Claude Debussy’s Ibéria, the second of his three Images. This score, first published in 1910, finds Debussy at the peak of his painterly form. Its first section, “In the Streets and Byways,” is not just painterly, but cinematic and three-dimensional: Fragmentary ideas are layered to suggest movement through a musically animated space. (Charles Ives was doing something similar at almost the same time on this side of the Atlantic.) Mr. Lang-Lessing guided the orchestra through a crystalline, crisply detailed rendering of the panoply. The middle section, “The Fragrances of the Night,” brought out myriad subtle colorations – and gorgeous solo work by Mr. Lueders on oboe and Jennifer Berg on English horn. The kinetic finale, “Morning of a Festival Day,” put the splendid percussion section in the spotlight
The concert opened with another French take on Spain. Emmanuel Chabrier’s España. It’s light, charming fare, but it gave the orchestra’s wonderful trombone section and principal tuba Lee Hipp a chance to shine.
The only Iberian trait of the prolific Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was his Portuguese language, but his Bachianas Brasileiras No. 4 was a welcome treat. The music comes closest (but still not very close) to Bach in the Preludio, a sort-of passacaglia for strings, detached from the set and played after the Chabrier on this concert. Mr. Lang-Lessing gave sumptuous shape to this elegiac music, and concertmaster Eric Gratz contributed lovely solo work. The remaining three movements, for the full orchestra, came after intermission. Mr. Lang-Lessing showed a strong affinity for the Brazilian folk rhythms in the Aria and the final Danse.
Mike Greenberg
SA Symphony, Sebastian Lang-Lessing, Angel Romero