November 19, 2016 Appropriately, perhaps, for its first concert of the post-11/9 era, the San Antonio Symphony under music director Sebastian Lang-Lessing performed late-Romantic  works of a somber cast. The program, Nov. 18 in the Tobin Center, opened with six orchestral excerpts from Richard Wagner’s Parsifal and closed with P.I. Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 (“Pathetique”). Both works are valedictory, the final major statements of their composers.  Mr. Lang-Lessing and the orchestra last essayed the Tchaikovsky Sixth just five years ago, but that performance was in the dry, harsh acoustics of the Majestic Theater.  The long resonance, warmth and timbral fidelity of the Tobin Center’s H-E-B Performance Hall presented the music in a more flattering light, and this time around Mr. Lang-Lessing found some new depths in the score.  The work is often interpreted, on dubious grounds, as a presentiment of the composer’s death, nine days after he conducted the 1893 premiere in Saint Petersburg, Russia. A feeling of gloom does hang over the opening pages and over the final movement, which dies with a whimper. But the music is given to sharp mood swings and layers of feeling. The first movement passes from gloom to splendid fury — made especially effective by Mr. Lang-Lessing’s supercharged tempi — and a broad, wistful love song. The second movement begins in graceful buoyancy but gives way to encroaching shadows. The third is triumphal, but also melodically banal. Mr. Lang-Lessing found here a sardonic strand that seemed altogether appropriate, and at the movement’s bombastic conclusion the audience was, as expected, tricked into vigorous applause until being plunged into the darkness of the finale.  Throughout, Mr. Lang-Lessing led his forces with his customary clear sense of direction, supple shaping, huge dynamic range and dramatically effective tempo relations. A roiling sense of internal motion made the finale especially absorbing. Principal bassoon Sharon Kuster’s organic phrasing and beautiful tone were marvelous in the first movement. The strings produced a radiant sound, though with some blurring of rapid passages in the first movement.   It would be hard to overstate the effect that Wagner’s shimmering, harmonically mobile orchestral atmospherics for Parsifal had on other composers of his time and later, at least through Debussy, Mahler and Sibelius. (The text, a mishmash of Christian, Buddhist and European pagan ideas, is another matter.) The Prelude and Good Friday Music have long been a standard pairing in the orchestral repertoire. For this performance, Mr. Lang-Lessing added four other excerpts for about 40 minutes of music.  The result didn't quite hang together as a unified arc, and the performance had its own issues: Too many entrances were ragged, and Mr. Lang-Lessing’s phrasing and rhythms were often curiously matter-of-fact — not necessarily a fault for those listeners who might have little patience for the music’s pretentious spirituality. But principal oboe Paul Lueders earned unqualified praise for his gorgeous solo work.  Mike Greenberg 

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Portrait of Tchaikovsky by Nikolai Kuznetsov

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Plunging into the darkness

San Antonio Symphony, Sebastian Lang-Lessing