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Olga Kern Photo: Chris Lee

Rachmaninoff in 1921 Photo: Kubey Rembrandt

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Manfred and the Witch of the Alps

 March 26, 2016 When the San Antonio Symphony is playing a great program, showcasing a brilliant soloist and firing on all cylinders under music director Sebastian Lang-Lessing, as was the case on March 25 in the Tobin Center, life just doesn’t get much better. Before cracking his figurative whip to begin the wild ride of Hector Berlioz’s Le Corsaire Overture, the first scheduled work on the program, Mr. Lang-Lessing took note of recent terrorist attacks in Paris, Brussels, Turkey and elsewhere and led the orchestra in a lovingly shaped, luminous account of some of the most peaceful music ever composed, taken from the third entr’acte in Franz Schubert’s incidental music for Rosamunde. The conductor also dedicated the concert to the memory of Ruth Jean Gurwitz, a widely admired music patron and pianist who died last year.  The concert’s centerpiece was Sergei Rachmaninoff’s evergreen Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, with Olga Kern the superb piano soloist. The closer was Tchaikovsky’s epic and bizarre Manfred Symphony, in a performance that doubtless left much of the audience wondering why it is so seldom performed. The Russian composer and teacher Mily Balakirev had proposed to Berlioz the idea of a symphony based on Lord Byron’s dramatic poem. Berlioz declined, citing his advanced age and ill health, but also possibly because his own Symphonie fantastique had already covered much of the musical territory that Byron’s Faustian tale called forth. Balakirev then turned to Tchaikovsky, who at first was not interested but eventually warmed to the idea. He composed the four-movement work over the course of a few months in 1885.  From the beginning, the Manfred Symphony has inspired fervent admiration and scorn in roughly equal measure. Its stock has risen a bit in recent years, but it is probably still the least-often performed of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies. (San Antonio Symphony librarian Greg Vaught informs me that Lawrence Leighton Smith, then the ochestra’s music dorector, conducted Manfred on Nov. 21 and 23, 1981; and Eduardo García-Barrios conducted it on March 13 and 15, 1997. I confess I have no memory of either performance.)   Mr. Lang-Lessing’s hair-raising, theatrically astute leadership and the orchestra's taut, polished, go-for-broke performance left no room to doubt the greatness of the gigantic first movement, which pivots between gloom and frenzy.  The second, a sprightly fairy dance framing an Italianate lyrical section, is nearly on the same level. The swaying pastoral of the third movement is one of Tchaikovsky’s loveliest conceptions. The finale — well, OK, the finale is a yammering, meandering mess, including a silly appearance by an organ, that even Mr. Lang-Lessing couldn’t rescue. At least in this performance it wasn't quite as trying as usual.  After Ms. Kern’s first appearance with this orchestra in 2001, a few months after sharing the gold medal at the Van Cliburn International Competition, I wrote that, in the Schumann concerto, “her touch was very beautiful, producing a consistently firm, bell-like tone and clean articulation without percussiveness.” Her performance in the Rachmaninoff, which poses greater power demands and in which percussiveness is harder to avoid, evoked precisely the same thoughts. Ms. Kern’s miraculous touch made even in the loudest Dies Irae quotes sound as luxurious as a goose-down pillow. Her speed, accuracy and clarity in the work’s abundant show-off variations were dazzling, but she also brought probing introspection and supple tempo shaping to the slower variations. She had stamina enough to maintain panache all the way to the end, with enough left over for an encore of “The Flight of the Bumble Bee,” in Rachmaninoff’s transcription from Rimsky-Korsakov.  Mr. Lang-Lessing and the orchestra tore into Le Corsaire at hyper-speed while maintaining crisp ensemble. The strings sounded ravishing in the serene adagio, and the brass made a magnificent noise in the final stretch, an adrenaline rush of the first water — but that could describe the whole evening.     Mike Greenberg   

San Antonio Symphony, Sebastian Lang-Lessing, Olga Kern

Adrenaline rush

incident light