February 6, 2016 The final program in the San Antonio Symphony’s Las Américas series was something of a grab bag, but there’s nothing wrong with a grab bag when everything inside comes from Tiffany’s.  The arresting apex of the concert, Feb. 5 in the Tobin Center, was Astor Piazzolla’s Aconcagua Concerto for Bandoneón, with the brilliant Argentinian bandoneón master Juan Pablo Jofre joining the orchestra and music director Sebastian Lang-Lessing.  The bandoneón is a type of concertina, originally from Germany but popular in Argentina and Uruguay as the crucial instrument in tango ensembles. Piazzolla, also an Argentinian, was the greatest and most exploratory of the tango masters, but he also was trained in the modernist classical tradition. His Aconcagua brings those worlds together with great success. It is cannily scored for strings and percussion, but no woodwinds or brass, leaving sonic space for the bandoneón’s distinctive reedy timbre, which turned out to blend very nicely with the strings.  The concerto is in three movements — the first propulsive, with two solo cadenzas; the second darkly erotic, with some sweeping Romanticism; the finale opening coyly and building to a pulsating conclusion.  Mr. Jofre’s performance was urgent and compelling from start to finish. His playing was snappy and virtuosic in the outer movements, deeply expressive in the slow movement, in which long sustained notes breathed and sighed, swelled and contracted like living creatures.   For an encore, Mr. Jofre offered his own Milongon,  a 2012 work that opens with an elaborate solo cadenza, modernist in cut but also recalling the feeling of a Bach toccata, and then brings in the orchestra for a bracing finish.  The concert opened with the pairing of William Billings’s “Chester,” an 18th-century American hymn sung by the Mastersingers chorus offstage, with William Schuman’s modern orchestral expansion of the same tune as the third movement of his New England Triptych (1956). Mastersingers director John Silantien clearly had prepared the chorus to sing the original hymn in the style of the period, and the orchestra executed Schuman’s intricate filigree with astonishing precision and confidence.  Mr. Lang-Lessing showed remarkable sympathy for the style of the American composer (and conductor, of course) Leonard Bernstein in the Chichester Psalms and the symphonic suite from On the Waterfront, one of the great films and film scores of the mid-20th century. For the former, the Mastersingers stood in close formation so that, with a little scrunching by the orchestra, all the forces could fit within the shallow version of the shell, yielding the best acoustical results. The Chichester Psalms also had the estimable services of countertenor Ryland Angel, the strong soloist in the second movement’s serene setting of the 23rd Psalm. Mr. Lang-Lessing didn’t convey enough ecstatic buoyancy in the third movement’s asymmetrical meter, but the rest was just about ideal.  It was wonderful to hear the music from On the Waterfront liberated from its 1954 monaural soundtrack. In this crackling, taut, supremely polished performance, one could hear the influence of Gustav Mahler on the violent tumult, heart-on-sleeve sentimentality and ultimate optimism of Bernstein’s music. The concert closed with Arturo Márquez’s delicious Danzón No. 2 and, not listed on the program, the same composer’s rollicking Conga del Fuego. Both were exciting, sophisticated and smartly colored essays in Cuban rhythms. And in remarks at the start of the concert, Mr. Lang-Lessing told the audience: “We are going to commission a bigger piece from him for a future season.” Hooray! Apart from a momentary lapse of precision in the Danzon No. 2, the orchestra — as an ensemble and as a collection of fine soloists — was in superb form throughout the concert. My notes on the performance of Schuman's “Chester” say, “the sound of a justly confident orchestra,” and that was pretty much the story all evening. Another Hooray! Mike Greenberg

incident light

respond

A little of this, a little of that, a lot of wow

music

San Antonio Symphony, Sebastian Lang-Lessing, Juan Pablo Jofre

Juan Pablo Jofre

Leonard Bernstein Photo: Jack Mitchell