May 21, 2016 In his debut with the San Antonio Symphony, May 20 in the Tobin Center,  German guest conductor Gabriel Feltz made the strongest possible case for two works that have lived in the shadows of more-popular pieces by the same composers — namely, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. In the middle came Max Bruch’s certifiably popular Violin Concerto No. 1, essayed with great urgency and a wide color palette bythe American virtuoso Sarah Chang.  Tchaikovsky’s The Tempest Fantasy-Overture, inspired by Shakespeare’s play,  is considerably less familiar than the same composer’s Romeo and Juliet and Francesca da Rimini fantasies. Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 1 was panned at its 1897 premiere and never performed again during the composer’s lifetime; he expressed a desire to clean up the orchestration, but when he fled Russia in 1917 he left the score behind, and it was somehow lost. The orchestral parts turned up in 1944, however, and the reconstructed score entered the repertoire — but it hasn’t matched the wide appeal of Rachmaninoff’s two later symphonies.   Both of these eclipsed works have points in their favor. The Tempest begins and ends with delicately detailed depictions of a roiling, trackless sea; a frighteningly violent (and ear-splitting) storm erupts; there is an ardent if treacly love scene; Prospero abdicates nobly. The piece is overextended, however, and it doesn't have the melodic richness of Tchaikovsky’s better-known orchestral fantasies.  Once past a messy initial attack, the performance was luxurious, carefully paced and finely balanced, with especially lovely work from the strings in pianissimo passages. The big storm’s intricacies were expertly dovetailed, and one couldn’t ask for more magnificent banging than we got from David Reinecke on bass drum and Peter Flamm on timpani.  Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony has to be considered a remarkable achievement for a 22-year-old: It deserves respect for its thematic connections between movements and for its sheer spectacle.  But it wants concision, and the boldness of its big ideas is too often undermined by pedestrian or labored details. (This early symphony also lacks the big, lush tunes that make the later symphonies and piano concerti so popular, but that isn't necessarily a flaw.)  Mr. Feltz, now chief conductor of the Dortmund Philharmonic, earned wide notice for an extensive Rachmaninoff cycle with his previous orchestra, the Stuttgart Philharmonic. Here, he conducted the RFirst Symphony without a score, and his evidently deep familiarity with the work enabled him to keep the textures clean and transparent throughout — quite a feat. He and the orchestra delivered the bold strokes fearlessly. A bit more flexibility in tempo might have been nice — as a pianist, Rachmaninoff was not timid in his use of rubato, and it is reasonable to suppose he might have expected similar freedom in the shaping of his orchestral works. On the whole, however, this was a hugely effective performance.  Ms. Chang first learned the Bruch concerto on a 1/16th-size violin when she was five years old —no, that isn’t a typo. She set the piece aside for many years and then relearned it on a full-size instrument. So she knows the piece with the kind of intimacy that allows an artist to take risks, to focus on the emotional weight of every passage.  As in her account of the Brahms concerto with this orchestra in 2009, her tone wasn’t always conventionally beautiful, but it was always deeply expressive, intelligently colored and full of individual character. She brought a wonderful ferocity to the finale, and the near-capacity audience erupted at the end with explosive applause.  Earlier in the week, the excellent SOLI Chamber Ensemble closed its season in Ruth Taylor Recital Hall with an intriguingly structured program. On the first half, each of the four members played a solo work, and they came together after intermission for Aaron Jay Kernis’s perfectly dotty and delicious Four Seasons of Futurist Cuisine (1991).  In that four-movement work, Stephanie Key, normally SOLI’s clarinetist, donned a chef’s jacket and assumed the role of narrator, reciting with great panache from  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto and Futurist Cookbook. (You will surely want to try his “synoptic- syngustatory plate, not hot, but gently warmed, of peppers, garlic, rose petals, bicarbonate of soda, peeled bananas and cod liver oil equidistant from each other.”)  The music for piano (Carolyn True), violin (Etan Torgul) and cello (David Mollenauer) is a crazy take on futurist ideas, sometimes suggesting the machine aesthetic, sometimes the bombastic optimism that would eventually lead to Mussolini, and sometimes alluding to 19th-century proto-futurists such as Beethoven (the Ninth Symphony) and Wagner (Parsifal). The spirited, expert perfromance was a hoot.   In the first half, Ms. True played two short 2012 works by her former piano student Carter Pann, one a recomposition of “Danny Boy” with some adventurous harmonies, the other reminiscent of George Gershwin’s Tin Pan Alley style, but with greater textural complexity. Ms. Key played Jerome Kitzke’s She Left in the Crow-Black Night (2003), notable for wide melodic leaps and florid, raucous interruptions of the generally meditative, mournful line. Mr. Torgul gave a muscular, forceful account of John Corigliano’s The Red Violin Caprices (1999). Mr. Mollenauer’s cello sounded more than usually gorgeous in George Crumb’s Sonata for Solo Cello (1955), a very early and conservative work that gives few hints of the composer’s exploratory maturity.  Mike Greenberg

Sarah Chang Photo: Cliff Watt

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A strong case for works in eclipse

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F. T. Marinetti

SA Symphony, Gabriel Feltz, Sarah Chang; SOLI Chamber Ensemble