November 10, 2018
A special kind of magic occurs when a fellow human being speaks quietly and honestly of important matters, from a deep well of experience. That was the kind of magic (without pixie dust or sleight of hand) that the illustrious cellist Lynn Harrell brought to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat, with the San Antonio Symphony under music director Sebastian Lang-Lessing.
The concert, Nov. 9 in the Tobin Center, opened and closed with early Romantic-era orchestral works featuring storm scenes – the overture to Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (The Marksman) and Beethoven’s "Pastoral” Symphony.
The Cello Concerto No. 1 can be considered one of the core works of Shostakovich. It was composed in 1959, a year before another core work, the String Quartet No. 8. The composer’s signature D-S-C-H motif (the notes D, E-flat, C, B) representing his own name figures prominently in both, and also in a third core work, the Symphony No. 10 of 1951, near the end of Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical reign over the Soviet Union. The political context for the concerto and the string quartet was quite different – the anti-Stalinist premiere Nikita Khrushchev had brought something of a thaw in relations with the West and a less repressive climate at home. Both were destined to fail, however, and the dark, sometimes satirical mood of the concerto and quartet suggest that Shostakovich never pinned much hope on Khrushchev’s reforms.
Mr. Harrell’s performance in the opening allegretto struck me as too cautious, but he was riveting in the mournful and agitated second movement (here his dialog with the violas was especially beautiful) and in the extended cadenza that constitutes a movement of its own. He seemed at times to be speaking only to himself – one had to lean in and focus the attention to hear him – but every phrase brought a sense of recognition. The finale bristled with bite and fire.
His encore was a simple, direct and sincere performance of Schumann’s “Traümerei,” from Kinderszenen.
With its supernatural story line, Weber’s Singspiel (like an opera, but with spoken dialogue) Der Freischütz of 1821 may be slightly out of fashion, but the overture endures as one of the sturdiest and most dramatically astute of the period. Mr. Lang-Lessing gave it ideal pacing and punctuation, and the horn section sounded glorious.
Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony is his most congenial, apart from the storm scene with its gale-force winds and terrifying thunder claps – percussion principal Riely Francis, manning the timpani, was clearly having a blast with the hard mallets. (He had a blast again when he moved over to the bass drum for the orchestral encore, Johann Strauss II’s “Thunder and Lightning” Polka.)
Mr. Lang-Lessing’s leadership gave the music a consistently seamless sense of line, supple tempo play and extraordinary care with balances. The orchestral blend was creamy and luxurious – perhaps more appropriate for a later Romantic such as Brahms, but one can’t really complain about such elegant, burnished sound. Mr. Lang-Lessing has been experimenting a bit with seating. As in one or two previous concerts, the clarinets and bassoons were placed on the top tier of risers, among the brass, and the flutes and oboes moved up one level accordingly. The woodwinds seemed to project a stronger sound from their raised positions, and the more compact arrangement from front to rear may have helped ensemble precision – not that it was any slouch to begin with.
Of course, none of that would matter if the orchestra were not chock full of superb musicians. As is so often the case, special notice must go to principal oboe Paul Lueders for his spirited solo work in the “Pastoral” Symphony’s “Merry Gathering of Country Folk.”
Mike Greenberg
incident light
Lynn Harrell’s most recent previous appearance with the San Antonio Symphony was in 2009, when he played the Elgar concerto under guest conductor Christian Knapp in the Majestic Theater. Click here to read a review of the concert.
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In every phrase, a sense of recognition
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Lynn Harrell
Photo: Chad Batka
SA Symphony, SLL, Lynn Harrell