incident light

May 17, 2014 A few years before Serge Prokofiev composed his Fifth Symphony, he couldn’t win for losing. In the Kafkaesque house of mirrors that was the Soviet Union under Stalin, Prokofiev’s Modernist works were denounced as “formalist” – the analog in American cultural parlance would be “elitist” – and his efforts to please Stalin with suitably Socialist works drawing on folk material were denounced as simple-minded. A few years after Prokofiev composed his Fifth Symphony, he and five other composers – including Dmitri Shostakovich, Aram Khatchaturian and even the musically conservative  Nikolai Miaskovsky — fell victim to Andrei Zhdanov’s infamous condemnation of “formalist” music as representing “the contemporary modernist bourgeois of Europe and America.” (The decree was published just four days after the ceremony in which Prokofiev was awarded the title “People’s Artist of the RSFSR.”) But during the composition of his Fifth Symphony, Prokofiev was in the middle of a brief period of high cotton, or the Soviet equivalent. While Stalin’s attention was diverted by World War II, Prokofiev won popularity and official approval with his ballet scores for “Romeo and Juliet” and “Cinderella,” the film score for Sergei Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible” (Part I), the three great wartime piano sonatas (Nos. 6-8) and the First Violin Sonata. The Fifth Symphony, which enjoyed a hugely successful premiere in 1945, was awarded the Stalin Prize. The most intriguing aspect of the San Antonio Symphony’s performance of Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony on Friday night was music director Sebastian Lang-Lessing’s emphasis on musical gestures that ought to have rendered this work ineligible for the Stalin Prize. Those gestures — wild daubs of clashing colors, strange harmonic shifts, passages of very intricate counterpoint — help account for the work’s nearly universal recognition as one of the greatest symphonies of the 20th century. Something else: Lang-Lessing brought out a walking-on-eggs quality in the precise articulation and rhythm of the strings’ introduction to the adagio’s ghostly waltz. One can’t be sure if Prokofiev meant this music as a reflection of the plight of the artist in Soviet times, but Mr. Lang-Lessing did make a plausible case for that interpretation. In other respects, the performance matched the seamlessness, the organic sense of line and the fully expressed contrasts in tempo and dynamics that we have come to expect from Mr. Lang-Lessing. Oh, and the visceral excitement, too.  The orchestra generally responded with clean ensemble and beautiful playing, especially from principal clarinet Ilya Shterenberg in the second movement. Some of the thicker textures wanted more clarity, but the fault probably lay with the Majestic Theatre’s acoustics, to which the orchestra will soon bid adieu.  The American pianist Nicholas Angelich joined the orchestra in the concert’s opener, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3. Mr Angelich displayed bravura technique, with crisp runs and snappy trills and mordents, in the outer allegros; and a deeply personal, searching poetry in the largo. A tendency to fuss over phrasing – slowing here, hurrying there — resulted in some awkward rhythms. He played with lovely tone and directness in his encore, the opening section (“Of Foreign Lands and Peoples”) from Robert Schumann’s “Kinderszenen.” One more comment: I’ve detected a steady rise in the audience’s enthusiasm, often expressed in cheers and whistles along with applause, throughout this season — despite the Majestic’s acoustical shortcomings.  The overwhelming likelihood is that the orchestra will sound far better with its move to the Tobin Center next season.  We ain’t heard nothin’ yet. Mike Greenberg 

Sergei Prokofiev as a young man

respond

Prokofiev in high (Soviet) cotton

music

San Antonio Symphony, Lang-Lessing, Angelich

Andrei Zhdanov