Christina and Michelle (or Michelle and Christina) Naughton
incident light
respond
music
March 25, 2017
If pianists Christina and Michelle
Naughton had been living one or two
centuries ago, the great composers
might have been inspired to create far
more than a paltry half-dozen or so
significant concerti for two pianos and
orchestra.
But then we wouldn’t have been able
to hear the Naughton twins play the
bejeepers out of Francis Poulenc’s
two-piano concerto, arguably the
finest of the genre, with the San
Antonio Symphony under music
director Sebastian Lang-Lessing,
March 24 in the Tobin Center.
The Poulenc was the centerpiece of an altogether delicious, vividly colored, mostly Modern program. It opened with Paul Dukas’s popular The Sorceror’s Apprentice (1897) and closed with a generous selection of excerpts from Serge Prokofiev’s Cinderella ballet score. The performances were uniformly top-notch in ensemble precision and sonic polish.
Poulenc’s concerto dates from 1932, fairly early in his illustrious career. For the most part, the music is zesty, biting and droll, but near the end of the otherwise frothy first movement an eery, dreamlike episode borrows the repeating figures of the Balinese gamelan orchestra. The slightly melancholy middle movement consciously imitates Mozart. The finale gives the orchestra a passage of full-bore romanticism, and it demands brilliant technique from the pianists.
They, of course complied, but the thing that sticks in the memory is not so much their virtuosity as the spunk and insouciance of their style in all the piquant passages – and their delicate touch and sensitive phrasing in the calmer ones. One had the sense that they were playing from inside the composer’s head.
Their piano four hands encore was the rowdy, outrageous Boogie by the American composer Paul Schoenfield, remembered locally for the Cactus Pear Music Festival’s performance of his over-the-top Cafe Music a decade ago.
The Soviet-era Russian composer Serge Prokofiev composed his Cinderella ballet score between 1941 and 1944, while World War II was raging, sometimes within earshot. Mr. Lang-Lessing chose 11 numbers drawn from the three suites Prokofiev compiled from the full-evening ballet — about 40 minutes’ worth.
Prokofiev’s great Fifth Symphony dates from the same period, and the two works share some sonorities and ideas, but the ballet music is more varied and seemingly impetuous. As was customary for Prokofiev – and for Poulenc – the music pivots between crackling and lyrical styles. But whereas Poulenc strove for simplicity and directness, Prokofiev wrote music of great contrapuntal complexity and depth.
There is always a lot going on beneath the surface of this music, and under Mr. Lang-Lessing’s leadership the orchestra maintained diaphanous balances and meticulous ensemble, so everything could be heard. He brought apt heavy-heartedness to the opening scene, exhilarating energy to the prince’s ball, unearhly weirdness to the monstrous striking of midnight, and long-lined tenderness to the final love scene.
Perhaps it is scant comfort to the musicians to say that, throughout this concert, they played like an orchestra with three times the budget of the shamefully underfunded San Antonio Symphony. The current crop of principal players is the strongest in my memory, which extends back to the early 1960s, and they were all in top form for this concert. Judge for yourself: The program repeats Saturday, March 25, at 8 pm, and Sunday, March 26, at 2 pm in the Tobin Center.
Mike Greenberg
San Antonio Symphony, Sebastian Lang-Lessing, Christina & Michelle Naughton
Twin carburetor, plenty of zoom