June 8, 2019
Symphony orchestras often save their most spectacular programs for the end of the season, in order to convince stragglers to renew their subscriptions. Case in point: The San Antonio Symphony’s season closer, June 7 in the Tobin Center, under music director Sebastian Lang-Lessing. (Next season will be his last as music director – surely a strong motivation to re-up.)
The box-office draw was Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, in Maurice Ravel’s orchestration – one of the most popular pieces in the repertoire. Pictures got a superbly crafted, theatrically astute performance, but it was something of an anticlimax following Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky cantata, in a breathtaking – and sometimes earsplitting – performance featuring the Mastersingers chorus (splendidly prepared by John Siantien) and mezzo-soprano Veronica Williams.
Prokofiev derived his Nevsky cantata of 1939 from the music he’d composed for Sergei Eisenstein’s landmark film released the previous year. But the composer put great thought into excerpting, expanding, and reorchestrating the score in order to make it work as a concert piece.
The subject of the film was the Russian victory, under Prince Alexander, against an invading force of Estonians and Teutons in the 13th century. (Nevsky was not Alexander’s family name, but an honorific referring to the Neva River, site of the decisive “Battle on the Ice.”) It would be hard to imagine a more compatible pairing of film and music. To describe one is to describe the other. Whether the scene is clamorous or solemn, martial or lyrical, Eisenstein’s frames are stark, elemental, lapidary, and to the point, with nothing left over.
Some sections of Prokofiev’s music, especially the apocalyptic tumult of the “Battle on the Ice,” might seem the aural antithesis of Eisenstein’s visual economy, but even when the music is most crowded with incident and most chaotic in texture, Prokofiev maintains a strong, sweeping through line that, like a force of nature, carries the listener inevitably forward.
The performance was a stunner. Ensemble was a little loose at times, but every hair in place is not the right sound for this piece, anyway. Mr. Lang-Lessing’s tempos, phrasing, and balances homed in on the emotional pulse of every moment – the darkly brooding “Russia Under Mongol Rule,” the stirring implacability of “Arise, Ye Russian People,” the anxious anticipation before the “Battle on the Ice,” the gargantuan battle itself. Ms. Williams surveyed “The Field of the Dead” with a voice that was at once earthy and majestic. When the chorus welcomed “Alexander’s Entry into Moscow,” the fervor in the singing and the determined tempo elicited a shiver of joy.
First-rate solo work abounded from every nook and cranny of the orchestra. The percussion section was expanded to seven players (plus timpani), but lest there be any doubt as to which of them was first among equals, principal Riely Francis nearly stopped the show with his xylophone solos.
In the more familiar territory of Pictures, ensemble was taut and every surface polished. This orchestra has become impressively nimble of late, and never more so than in the frenetic commotion of “The Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells” and “The Marketplace of Limoges.” One could almost smell the dank air of the “Catacombs.” In sum: A great orchestra and a great conductor at the top of their game.
After Pictures, the Mastersingers reassembled in front of the orchestra for a rousing encore, the giddy finale of Alexander Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances.
Mike Greenberg
Battle scene in Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky. The cinematographer was Eduard Tisse.
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SA Symphony, SLL, Mastersingers, Veronica William