Aaron Copland in 1932 Library of Congress Music Division

Sebastian Lang-Lessing Photo: Mike Greenberg

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January 30, 2016 If there was a defect in the San Antonio Symphony’s concert of Jan. 30, the third in its Las Américas series, it was an excess — no, a deluge — of gorgeousness.  In itself gorgeousness is hardly a bad thing, and one can justifiably celebrate an orchestra, a music director (Sebastian Lang-Lessing), a soloist (concertmaster Eric Gratz), and an acoustical environment (the extraordinary H-E-B Performance Hall at the Tobin Center) that can pump out so much of it with such élan. But a little goes a long way. Halfway through the third item on the program, a suite of orchestral ear candy from Daniel Catán’s 1996 opera Florencia en el Amazonas, I found myself longing for the joys of asceticism.  No complaints about the opening work, Aaron Copland’s rollicking El Salón México, which owes as much to Stravinsky and to Brooklyn moxie as it does to its Mexican source material. It’s one of Copland’s strongest and most enduring scores, largely in his tough, rugged style but with episodes of tender lyricism. Mr. Lang-Lessing led a taut, machine-tooled, virtuosic performance, one fetching feature of which was a double-dose of sweetness and eroticism in the lyrical passages. Principal trumpet John Carroll did terrific solo work.  Mr. Gratz, now in his third season as the San Antonio Symphony’s concertmaster, was nearly flawless in Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto.  His tone was pure, sweet and focused on top, rich and full of character down below, and his nimbleness and accuracy made the rapid-fire finale seem like easy work. His instrument didn’t project a big enough sound up to the balcony, but that’s a minor point. The audience responded with a huge ovation, one of the most extended in my memory. (Just the day before, Mr. Gratz had released his début album, available on Amazon and iTunes.) The problem was the concerto itself, which swaths the first two movements in a gauze of — well, gorgeousness, for both the soloist and the orchestra.  Even the middle movement, whose main theme is a melody of great emotional depth (announced first by principal oboe Paul Lueders in a superb solo), seems at the end to have subsumed meaning to sheer beauty.  The same could be said of the concert’s closing work, also by Barber: Medea’s Dance of Vengeance does build to a nice, violent frenzy, but the sugar glaze in the orchestration seems somehow unseemly for portraying a lady who kills her children to get back at her two-timing husband. Catán was born in Mexico but educated in England, and he spent much of his professional life in the United States. He died in Austin in 2011 while working on a commission for UT- Austin’s Butler School of Music. Two of his operas, the comedy Salsipuedes (2004) and the magical-realist drama Florencia en el Amazons (1996) were first staged by Houston Grand Opera.  Both were more interesting for their orchestral writing than for their vocal lines.  Hearing a goodly share of the orchestral music from Florencia played by a first-class orchestra, shaped by a great conductor, on the stage of an acoustically splendid hall, redoubled the impression that Catán was a supremely gifted colorist, in the line of Debussy and Korngold. Every moment of these six orchestral extracts was — what’s the word I’m looking for? — oh yes, gorgeous. The colors were both vivid and, in their tropical-fruit-blend variations, infinitely subtle. The sound of the orchestra bathed the listener in exquisite, ever-changing pleasures, not least of which was associate concertmaster Bonnie Terry’s warm violin solo in the final movement. But the whole felt more like an IMAX travelogue than a real journey. 
Yes, I know. There’s enough ugliness and bloodshed and tyranny and stupidity in the world. We could use a concentrated dose of gorgeousness. I get that. To a point.  Mike Greenberg

For details of Eric Gratz's début album click here.

San Antonio Symphony, Sebastian Lang-Lessing, Eric Gratz

A deluge of gorgeousness

incident light

San Antonio Symphony concertmaster Eric Gratz

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