May 7, 2016 After more than four years as the  San Antonio Symphony’s associate conductor, Akiko Fujimoto made her debut on the orchestra’s classical subscription series, May 6 in the Tobin Center, in a program dominated by  the French romantic style at high tide. Romantic program. The Croatian pianist Martina Filjak, returning for her third San Antonio appearance, was the soloist in Camille Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Minor.  Ms. Filjak is remembered for a 2009 performance on the San Antonio International Piano Competition’s recital series and for her 2013 San Antonio Symphony debut in Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain.  Once again, in the heroically demanding Saint-Saëns concerto, she showed a great affinity for the sweep, grandeur and bold contrasts of the Romantic style. This performance struck me as less personal than her prior outings — she seemed more content to let the music speak for itself. That was all to the good in the opening andante, which benefited from her attention to basic musical values in the application of her luxurious touch, fluid technique and ample power. Everything that followed was handsomely played, but the mercurial middle movement wanted a more playful attitude, and more swagger and braggadocio would have been entirely justified in the finale. (Then again, maybe we’re getting quite enough of those qualities from a certain candidate for president of the United States.)   Ms. Filjak's encore (played after announcing that she was donating part of her fee to the symphony, to help with its financial woes) was a partial reprise from her 2009 recital — Franz Liszt’s transcription of JS Bach’s Organ Prelude in A Minor, delivered with great feeling, intelligent voicing and immaculate precision.  Ms. Fujimoto’s account of Georges Bizet’s Symphony No. 1 in C was a shade too cautious but well put together. The glory of the performance was principal oboe Paul Lueders’s gorgeous solo in the slow movement, ably abetted by assistant principal Hideaki Okada.  The music of Frederick Delius is not often heard hereabouts. A Brit who spent two years in Florida managing his father’s orange groves before attending the Leipzig Conservatory, he moved to Paris in his late 20s and stayed in the vicinity (apart from a brief sojourn back in England during World War I) until he died in 1934. He was married (unfaithfully) to the German painter Jelka Rosen. English, French, German and African-American influences can all be heard in his music.  His The Walk to the Paradise Garden (1906), originally composed as a scene-change intermezzo for his opera “A Village Romeo and Juliet,” is one of the earliest examples of  his mature style, with relentlessly beautiful chromatic harmonies showing the influence of Wagner and Strauss and an elusive line recalling Debussy. In the opera, “The Paradise Garden” is the name of the seedy pub where the young lovers plan to commit suicide. The piece partakes of some of the feeling of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and one chord near the end sounds like an explicit reference to the “Liebestod.”  Other critics have noted that Delius’s mature music is less architectural” than “painterly.” For all its harmonic beauty, its structural spine and directional flow can be hard to find. I can’t say that Ms. Fujimoto succeeded where many others have fallen short, but she crafted luminous, iridescent balances and got ravishing sound from the strings.  The closing work was César Franck’s Le Chasseur maudit (The Accursed Huntsman), an astonishing work, cinematic (think WD Griffith) in its spectacular effects. Here, Ms. Fujimoto and the orchestra were in top form, conspiring in a vivid, viscerally exciting performance.   Mike Greenberg     

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Martina FiljakPhoto: Romano Grozich

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French Romanticism at high tide

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Akiko Fujimoto Photo: Liz Garza Williams

San Antonio Symphony, Akiko Fujimoto, Martina Filjak