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How’d that revolution work out?
Vladimir Lenin
music
October 21, 2017
Strictly speaking, music
doesn’t mean anything, but it
does carry cultural baggage,
and the contents of the bags
can change with time and
place. Consider, for example,
the works that opened and
closed the San Antonio
Symphony’s concert of Oct.
20 in a sparsely populated
Tobin Center.
Conducted by music director
Sebastian Lang-Lessing, the
concert closed with Dmitri
Shostakovich’s Symphony No.
12, “The Year of 1917.”
Premiered in 1961, the work
supposedly celebrated the
October Revolution and was
dedicated to the memory of
its leader, Vladimir Lenin, the
anti-establishment champion
of the working class who
governed the Soviet Union as
an anti-democratic, anti-press
authoritarian. (Stop me if
you’ve heard this one.)
Despite the composer’s
ostensible intention, and the
work’s reception in the Soviet
Union, it is hard today not to
hear in its tired ideas and
over-the-top bombast a
dismissive “Whatever, dude.”
The concert began with the
semi-obligatory playing of
“The Star-Spangled Banner,”
a British gentlemen’s club drinking song repurposed as the United States’ national anthem, with militaristic lyrics by Francis Scott Key. The cultural loading of the piece has certainly changed in the past year, with the spread of “take the knee” protests directed at racial inequality and police brutality against people of color. Formerly a unifying anthem (but was it ever that, really?), it now is a battleground between the woke and the sleeping. Maybe it’s time for the symphony to stop playing the anthem in the opening concerts of its subscription series and save it for a special patriotic shindig – you know, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “America the Beautiful,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the Shostakovich 12th….
The 12th is far from A-list Shostakovich, but Mr. Lang-Lessing and the orchestra were not thereby deterred from giving it a boffo performance – polished, crisp, beautifully detailed, almost Mozartrean in some delicate passages, and, in the over-extended triumphalist finale that doth protest too much, loud as all get-out. Local audiologists should make out like bandits.
The concert's centerpiece was the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, with Augustin Hadelich returning (he played the Beethoven concerto last year) in the starring role. By every objective standard, this was a superb performance. Mr. Hadelich’s 1723 “Ex-Kiesewetter” Stradivari instrument projected a warm, rich, substantial tone, with a robust low end and gleaming highs. The concerto abounds in stratospheric high notes, every one of which Mr. Hadelich landed on with astonishing accuracy and felicity. He delivered the most demanding virtuosic passages with sparking cleanliness.
Subjectively, it was a different story: The more lyrical passages in the opening allegro and in the central slow movement were a shade too deliberately phrased, to my ear more contrived than felt. Some of the brilliant passages in the first movement, including the cadenza, were played with unsurpassed skill, but they, too, sometimes wanted more spontaneity. The finale, however, found the violinist fully in his element. He played this music as though it were his own, and it was great fun.
Once past the National Anthem, the concert began in earnest with Dmitri Kabalevsky’s brash and brassy Colas Breugnon Overture, which suffered from slight ensemble problems at first but soon settled into a confident groove.
Special huzzahs go to principal bassoon Sharon Kuster and principal trombone Steve Peterson for their splendid solo work in the Shostakovich, and for assistant principal oboe Zach Boeding for a ravishing solo line in the Tchaikovsky concerto.
As in last month's season opener, the orchestra used the H-E-B Performance Hall’s full-depth shell, and all musicians sat behind the proscenium. The strings had a little less presence than they did in previous concerts when the orchestra used a shallower shell and the strings sat a few feet farther forward. The difference wan’t huge, but it was big enough to argue in favor of a return to the shallow shell and the optimum acoustics.
Mike Greenberg
San Antonio Symphony, Sebastian Lang-Lessing, Augustin Hadelich