January 12, 2019
Even in San Antonio's mild winters, January is a time for nourishing, stick-to-the-ribs meals and blessed relief from December’s enforced diet of sugary calories.
Accordingly, San Antonio Symphony music director Sebastian Lang-Lessing has devoted the month’s classical concerts in the Tobin Center to music of especially great depth and serious purpose.
The major works on the Jan. 11 concert (repeated on the 12th) were Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No 4 in E minor and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466, with the distinguished American pianist Anne-Marie McDermott in the solo role. (She was substituting on short notice for the ailing Gabriela Montero, whose vehicle would have been Mozart’s only other minor-key piano concerto, No. 24 in C minor, K. 491.) The concert opened with a pleasurable 2015 work of somewhat lighter weight, the Chinese composer Tan Dun’s Passacaglia: Secret of Wind and Birds.
The D minor concerto, composed and first performed in 1785, holds an exalted place in Mozart’s catalog. It requires the largest orchestra of all his piano concertos, with a complement of winds that would be suitable for a symphony. The darkness and agitation of the orchestral introduction anticipate the feeling at the start of Mozart’s “Great” G-minor symphony, which would come in 1788 – and which is actually scored for a smaller orchestra than the D minor concerto. The work’s greatness was quickly and widely recognized: It was the only Mozart concerto to be performed regularly throughout the century following the composer’s death in 1791.
Chief among its admirers was Beethoven, who in 1809 composed the two cadenzas that Ms. McDermott played in this performance. (Brahms, Busoni, Alkan and others also wrote cadenzas for this concerto; Mozart improvised the cadenzas in performance and did not leave written versions.) Some critics have faulted Beethoven’s first-movement cadenza for sounding too much like Beethoven and too little like Mozart, but in truth this concerto contains the seeds of Beethoven’s own way of assembling large unified structures from a few short motives.
Ms. McDermott’s credits, a list as long and powerful as Pau Gasol’s arm, are based on fundamental musical values. Her performance here was notable for clarity, restraint and close teamwork with the conductor and orchestra – she was really listening and responding to them. But she took full advantage of the personal expressive possibilities in Beethoven’s solo cadenzas – probing, deep and deliberative in the first-movement cadenza, boldly explosive in the shorter one for the finale.
In the Brahms Fourth, Mr. Lang-Lessing elicited from the orchestra a distinctly Brahmsian sound – transparent and nimble, but also gaining a luxurious quality from exquisite balances, every voice fitting smoothly into a unified texture. The impeccable craft was somewhat distancing in the first two movements, but then Lang-Lessing let ‘er rip with supercharged tempos in the scherzo and a finale whose inexorable momentum led to a blazing finish. The cellos made gorgeous song in the andante, principal flute Mark Teplitsky had a wonderfully supple solo in the finale, and the whole brass battalion sounded terrific throughout.
Mr. Tan’s Passacaglia follows baroque tradition in being based on a simple descending theme, repeated with various elaborations. But the present also appears in the form of a minute’s worth of recorded birdlike sounds made by traditional Chinese instruments and played back on the listeners’ and musicians’ smart phones. The score for live orchestra is highly coloristic and wide-ranging in affect – sometimes raucous and exuberant, sometimes sweepingly cinematic, sometimes (as in a spare variation for harp, tuned percussion and voices) sublime.
The orchestra and Mr. Lang-Lessing continue the hearty winter menu on Jan. 25-26 with a single work, Mahler’s Symphony No. 9.
Mike Greenberg
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A hearty winter menu
Anne-Marie McDermott
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San Antonio Symphony, Sebastian Lang-Lessing, Anne-Marie McDermott