Detlev Glanert Photo: © Ronald Knapp

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Pianist Alexander Gavrylyuk, after a 2013 performance with Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

May 30, 2015 Great acoustics can be a double-edged sword. On one edge, the San Antonio Symphony’s polished, powerful, taut and confident playing in Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, on May 29, indicated that the orchestra and music director Sebastian Lang-Lessing have learned quickly how to capitalize on the considerable strengths of the new Tobin Center’s H-E-B Performance Hall.  On the other edge, some sort of backstage mishap during the work’s brooding slow movement caused a comically extended crash that, thanks to the wonderful acoustics of one of America’s great concert rooms, was audible in splendid detail throughout the hall.  That intrusion aside, all hands racked up points throughout the concert. The brilliant Ukrainian pianist Alexander Gavrylyuk returned to town, this time as soloist in Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor. (His vehicle in his 2011 performance was Franz Liszt’s Concerto No. 1.) The concert opened with the world premiere of German composer Detlev Glanert’s “American Prelude” No. 3, his contribution to the orchestra’s series of 75th-anniversary commissions. speaking.” The uncredited source for that quotation was Solomon Volkov’s “Testimony,” which purported to be Shostakovichs own memoirs but whose authenticity is widely disputed.  Of course, it is entirely possible that the composer really did intend the work to be “about” the murderous tyrant and his repressive regime. But even if that was the case, to describe the Tenth Symphony as a reaction against Stalin is to trivialize it and to misunderstand the creative process. Like any great art work, the Tenth Symphony is equally about its own creator and his craft. And it was his craft, his discipline that came most to the fore in this performance. Yes, the cackling, sardonic scherzo did suggest Stalin’s mindless, monstrous despotism, and the finale was entirely consistent with the giddiness of an artist who could at last breathe semi-freely after Stalin was safely dead.  But the superlative clarity of this performance gave at least equal weight to the poetics of composition — the internal logic of the piece, the intelligence underlying its construction. In a curious way those abstract qualities were more political than the supposed program of the symphony.  Stalin, after all, despised abstraction and intelligence.  The orchestra was in terrific shape for the Shostakovich. The strings sounded substantial and silken. The brass projected power with elegance. The woodwinds — holy Toledo, the woodwinds! The flute section had a particularly fine evening, with glorious solo work from principal flute Martha Long and piccolo Julie Luker. If there were any glitches, they were too minor to notice.  Mr. Lang-Lessing got beautiful balances from the orchestra, especially in the ruminative opening and in the waltz section of the third movement. His shaping of tempo was supple but never fussy, and as usual his tempo relations were smartly judged. When strict meter was called for, as in a section of the first movement, he could have a given a quartz timepiece a run for its money. The scherzo gained excitement from the conductor’s way of alternately pushing and relaxing the tempo.  Mr Gavrylyuk’s limitless technique tamed the Tchaikovsky concerto’s notorious demands with seeming ease. He projected a beautifully ringing tone, which maintained its beauty in passages of enormous power and in those of great delicacy. His phrasing was sometimes angular, especially in staccato passages — not in any way a flaw, but a welcome new seasoning in a too-familiar dish.  His encore was a sensitively shaded account of Chopin’s Nocturne in D-flat, Op. 27, No. 2. Mike Greenberg   

Read Diane Windeler’s review of Alexander Gavrylyuk’s 2011 performance with the San Antonio Symphony.

San Antonio Symphony, SLL, Alexander Gavrylyuk

Lasting eight minutes and 20 seconds, Glanert’s piece was longer than most of those commissions, intended as short curtain-raisers, but it seemed short relative to the richness of its ideas. It opened with fast, frenetic, intricately constructed and boldly colored music that had an urban American feeling — it brought to mind Piet Mondrian’s painting “Broadway Boogie-Woogie.” A barely audible pianissimo shimmer in the strings began a long, gradual crescendo that eventually involved the full orchestra — lots of pulsing low brass — and ended with a radiant sunrise.  The performance wanted a little more precision in the opening section, but on the whole the orchestra and Mr. Lang-Lessing made an excellent case for the piece.  The unidentified author of the program notes for this concert quotes Shostakovich as saying of his Tenth Symphony, composed in 1953 after the death of Joseph Stalin, “It’s about Stalin and the Stalin years. The second part, the scherzo, is a musical portrait of Stalin, roughly 

High craft (and crash) in Shostakovich 10th

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