November 17, 2018
It has been about five years since violinist Eric Gratz was appointed concertmaster of the San Antonio Symphony at the absurdly young age of 22. He showed immense promise from the start, and I think it fair to say he has overachieved in every category – as leader of the orchestra’s strings, as a soloist, and as a collaborator in chamber music.
He gave his strongest solo performance to date in Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade: After Plato’s Symposium, Nov. 16 in the Tobin Center, with the orchestra in the capable hands of its former associate conductor, Akiko Fujimoto. (She was appointed assistant conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra in 2017.) The concert opened with a suite (1996) from Toru Takemitsu’s music for the Japanese TV film Nami no Bon. After intermission came Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8.
This year is the centennial of Bernstein’s birth, and it’s been 28 years since he died, but opinion of his music-making – both as a composer and as a conductor – has not settled. His rough-and-tumble, streetwise, pop-inflected mode wins general admiration for the brilliance of its craft, but his lyrical mode could sometimes overshoot the mark and end up in the maudlin range.
The Serenade – it’s really a violin concerto in all but name – is one of Bernstein’s strongest, most disciplined and most satisfying works. (It was composed in 1954, the same year as Bernstein’s score for the film On the Waterfront.) Each of its five moments, named for characters in the dinner-party conversation about the many meanings of “love,” has a distinctive musical profile. The emotional range extends from a presto that evinces a sort of confused wit (“Eryximachus”) to an adagio of deep, contemplative beauty (“Agathon”).
In the warmth and poise that the violinist brought to the deliberative opening solo statement, Mr. Gratz was like a great story teller immediately gaining the confidence of his listeners. He knew where he would be taking us, and we wanted to follow him. Throughout the performance, he combined superb technique – virtually perfect intonation, incisive rhythms, rich double-stops – with a sense of humanity. The apex was in “Agathon,” where Mr. Gratz spun a luminous filament of heartfelt melody high above the rest of the strings’ gently lapping waves. Mr. Gratz, Ms. Fujimoto and the orchestra showed the kind of close teamwork that develops only among musicians who have gotten to know each other well. There was an especially lovely dialog between Mr. Gratz and principal cello Ken Freudigman in the “Socrates” section of the fifth movement, and all concerned brought great energy to the complex, rollicking close, named for the late-arriving Alcibiades.
Mr. Gratz’s encore was a thoughtful account of the third movement (Largo) from JS Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 3 in C.
Two sides of Takemitsu’s musical personality took turns showing themselves in the suite from Nami no Bon. We heard his shimmering, coloristic side, with roots perhaps in the sound-for-its-own-sake tradition in Japanese music. And we heard his sentimental, conservative approach to traditional Western tonality. Well, actually, in this music “sentimental” turned into “sappy.” Worse, the same theme returned with little change far too many times, stretching about 12 minutes of music to 18. At least the performance was beautiful.
Ms. Fujimoto’s reading of the familiar Dvorak symphony tended to be big, muscular and sometimes brash. Ensemble was a little loose, and the balances sometimes wanted refinement, but she got spirited playing from the orchestra. The whole brass section had a terrific outing.
Mike Greenberg
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A great story teller on the violin
San Antonio Symphony, Akiko Fujimoto, Eric Gratz
Akiko Fujimoto
Photo: Josh Kohanek
Eric Gratz