Daniel HopePhoto: Harald Hoffmann

Till Eulenspiegel

Richard Strauss

Doug Balliett

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San Antonio Symphony, Sebastian Lang-Lessing, Daniel Hope

January 24, 2015 Near the end of his life Richard Strauss, who had given the world  a raft of brilliant orchestral tone poems, indisputably great songs  and superb operas, offered this remarkable self-assessment: “I may  not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate  composer.” Setting aside the question of whether he actually believed that,  Strauss was certainly a polarizing figure during his lifetime.  Supporters admired his advanced harmony, his immense skill at manipulating an immense orchestra, his ability to convey emotional  and dramatic detail through music. Detractors derided his frequent  resort to shock and sensationalism.  Strauss’s stature has never quite settled. For a long time after his  death in 1949 this composer, once seen as a rebellious shockmeister,  was regarded as a conservative, the last gasp of Romanticism. More recently his Modernist side has come to be recognized more fully,  even in relatively tame works from his middle years such as the ballet score “Josephslegende” (1914), the 1947 “Symphonic Fragment” of which was the centerpiece of a mostly-Strauss concert by the San Antonio Symphony on Jan. 23 in the Tobin Center’s H-E-B Performance Hall. Music director Sebastian Lang-Lessing conducted the concert, second in a series of four dedicated to Strauss and his influences (in both directions). The program also held the two most-popular of Strauss’s tone poems, “Don Juan” (1889) and “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks” (1895), and the 1947 Violin Concerto by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who was strongly influenced by Strauss. The concert opened with the world premiere of Doug Balliett’s bizarrely delicious “I’m Sorry Texas,” part of the season’s series of 75th-anniversary commissions.  The “Don Juan” was a performance to cherish. Mr. Lang-Lessing brought forth all the hormonal energy in the score, gauging tempo relations to keep the music constantly surging ahead. There was a remarkable seamlessness to the performance, all of Strauss’s brilliant effects appearing as part of a unified whole. Best of all was the ardent, deeply erotic shaping of phrases in the lyrical middle section. (If that's how Don Juan made love, it's no wonder he was a hit with the ladies.)  Larry Rachleff's 2007 account of the piece was comparably fine interpretively, but Mr. Lang-Lessing had at his disposal a stronger violin section and the superior acoustics of the H-E-B Performance Hall. The whole orchestra played like a champion in “Don Juan,” with especially notable work coming from the horns (strong, confident and scrupulously in tune) and from principal oboe Paul Lueders, whose tender solo work is firmly lodged in memory. “Till Eulenspiegel,” whose subject was a trickster of Medieval German legend, occupied similarly high ground. Any orchestra in the world would be pleased to have principal horn Jeff Garza on hand to play those spectacular horn calls. And concertmaster Eric Gratz impressed with his sweet tone and insinuating phrasing.  Strauss never quite warmed to the subject of “Josephslegende.” In contrast to the stimulating bad boys Till and Don Juan, Joseph was a bore. All he did, in the ballet scenario by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Harry Graf Kessler, was look pretty and refuse a roll in the hay with Potiphar's wife. The full ballet score, lasting a little over an hour, calls for an orchestra of profligate size and uses it for some wonderfully opulent effects, but much of the writing is dull or emptily bombastic. The “Symphonic Fragment,” which Strauss crafted for San Antonio Symphony founding music director Max Reiter, reduces the orchestra to merely huge proportions (only two harps? no contrabass clarinet?) and eliminates a lot  of the tedium. The result is an almost-compact 24 minutes. Though little is really inspired, much that remains is charming, colorful and attractive. This performance certainly made the strongest possible case for the piece, and particularly for the characteristics of the writing that are most modern in their harmonies and textures.  (One hesitates to bring up this subject, but in an interview posted to YouTube prior to the concert, Mr. Lang-Lessing was clearly under the misapprehension that the subject of “Josephslegende” — the Joseph famous for the coat of many colors — was the same Joseph who made an honest woman of Mary, the mother of Jesus. He was not. Granted, we don’t hire conductors to teach Bible class, but he really should have known better. As should the reviewer for a local newspaper.) Mr. Hope made a splendid showing in the Korngold  concerto. Stylistically on the money, he brought the right  amount and kind of portamento to the music. His technique  was fully equal to the demand, even in the ridiculously  showy finale, but he appropriately exchanged a peck of  accuracy for a bushel of spiritedness  here and there. In the  central Romance, he spun a gorgeous filament of melody,  enlivened with wonderful rhythmic freedom. His tone was  firm, clear and gutsy.  We have had occasion in the past to admire Mr. Balliett’s  work as a bass player (formerly with the San Antonio  Symphony) and a composer of strange sensibility. In the  span of about six minutes, “I’m Sorry Texas” impetuously  drops brief snatches of pop-oriented material, some of it  quite funny, into a shimmering atmospheric texture, much  of which is eerily beautiful. The piece is overrun with ideas. It probably meets no academic standard of correctness. What of it? As the song says, “If loving you is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.” The music-making began in the lobby, where a wind ensemble from the YOSA Philharmonic gave a nicely poilished account of Strauss’ Serenade, Op. 7.  For those keeping track of the orchestra’s continuing adjustments to the H-E-B Performance Hall’s acoustics: For this concert, the orchestra used a short shell, with the rear wall set forward. The front desks of strings were closer to the apron than they had been for the concerts of Nov. 7-8, when the short shell previously appeared, and this time the forestage reflector was tilted. Percussion and brass shared a low riser at rear. For the first time, the first and second violins were seated together at the conductor’s left; the violas were on his right, in front of the cellos. The results were the best yet. The strings projected a substantial  sound, though the violins and violas could have used a little fattening. Overall the balances were clean and the sound airy, only the loudest tutti passages seeming a little congested.  Mike Greenberg    

In mostly-Strauss concert, the bad boys win

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