Eric Gratz

respond

February 7, 2015 The two works by Richard Strauss on the San Antonio Symphony’s concert of Feb. 6 in the Tobin Center were composed only about 18 years apart, but they are snapshots of two vastly different historical epochs.  The capstone of the concert, the last of four Strauss Festival programs conducted by music director Sebastian Lang-Lassing, was the tone poem “Ein Heldenleben” (A Hero’s Life), which Strauss composed in 1898. Germany at the time was still the beneficiary of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s progressive social policies and former Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck’s careful diplomacy. (The two men detested each other’s best qualities, and Wilhelm gave Bismarck the boot in 1890.) Germany, unified only since 1870, had become an industrial powerhouse, the linchpin of a mostly peaceful Europe.  which Strauss arranged shortly after the Second World War and which was given its US premiere by the San Antonio Symphony under Max Reiter in 1948, offers in compressed form much of what makes the opera so wonderful — a sense of yearning, a radiance amid darkness, an extraordinary subtlety in the complex textures for a huge orchestra. According to the conductor Ferdinand Leitner, Strauss himself declared “Die Frau ohne Schatten” the favorite of his operas. Both works got splendid performances. Mr. Lang-Lessing once again demonstrated a deep sympathy with Strauss’s distinctive rhythmic thrust and (especially in the Symphonic Fantasy) with the essential delicacy and transparency in those dense textures. The orchestra was in top form — the augmented horn section, principal trumpet John Carroll and principal tuba Lee Hipp earned special plaudits, along with Mr. Gratz, who whose spirited, focused, accurate musicianship was everything one could wish. The strings sounded rich and full, thanks in part to seven extra players.  (The two extra players in the double-basses might have been more profitably assigned to the violins.)   The concert opened with the world premiere of the brief “Piedemonte” by the young Colómbian composer Juan David Osorio López. A propulsive, skillfully scored piece with very complex rhythms based in Colómbian folk idioms, “Piedemonte” is somewhat comparable to Mexican composer Jose Pablo Moncayo’s “Huapango” and perhaps worthy of comparable ubiquity. And another Strauss was heard from — Johann Strauss Jr., unrelated to Richard, was represented by his “Kunstlerleben” (Artist’s Life) Waltzes, shaped with a puro Viennese lilt by Mr. Lang-Lessing.  Now that the concert configuration in the new H-E-B Performance Hall has settled into what seems to be its final shape, I took the opportunity to sneak up to the balcony to hear “Ein Heldenleben.” The acoustics up there in the cheap seats (Row G, the seat nearest the house-right wall) were glorious — airy, rich, nicely blended, clean and open even in the loudest tutti passages, and with a good balance of direct and reflected sound. Mr. Gratz’s violin projected beautfiully, even in the faintest pianissimi. The orchestral sound was less aggressive and less bright than it had been on the front row of the mezzanine at a previous concert (with the same configuration), but it still had plenty of presence.  It had more of a velvety, Old-World patina than the sound at my usual seat on Row D of the mezzanine. The sound didn’t have quite the erotic voluptuousness and spaciousness of the Meyerson in Dallas, but the Tobin balcony’s acoustic struck me as clearer, more faithful to instrumental timbres and better suited to a wider range of repertoire. I’ll try the main floor in a future concert.                                                     Mike Greenberg

Sebastian Lang-Lessing Photo: courtesy Opus3 Artists

San Antonio Symphony, Sebastian Lang-Lessing, Eric Gratz

The view from the top

Juan David Osorio López

“Ein Heldenleben” is, accordingly, an optimistic, technically advanced work in which a supremely skillful composer struts his stuff. It includes a tumultuous battle scene, but peace soon returns, a reminder that wars in the late 19th century were generally short and decisive. The core of the piece is all about love — a wonderful extended episode featuring a solo violin (concertmaster Eric Gratz, in a magisterial performance), representing the composer’s wife, Pauline.  Before intermission came the Symphonic Fantasy from the opera “Die Frau ohne Schatten” (The Woman Without a Shadow), an opera that Strauss composed between 1911 and 1917 — a period that included most of the Great War that Bismarck predicted would occur as a result of Wilhelm’s military and imperial ambitions. The opera, with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is based on an old fairy tale: A half-human empress, born without a shadow, tries to buy one from a mortal woman in order to keep the Emperor from being turned to stone. The shadow, of course, is a metaphor for love and family, and by extension for the human values that many in the period felt were threatened by industrialism, militarism and imperialism — and that were disrupted utterly by the war. The Symphonic Fantasy,

incident light

Reflections of Germany at high tide and low

music