February 1, 2025 The San Antonio Philharmonic’s inaugural concert in its new home, the Scottish Rite Hall, restored considerable luster to that recently tarnished word “inaugural.” In last fall’s concerts, in First Baptist Church, the Phil sounded scruffy – alarmingly so. But in the fourth outing of its third season the orchestra was all polish, precision, and confidence. Music director Jeffry Kahane was in charge of a program that began with a brief but enticing piece by Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, a member of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. The closer was Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 in a performance of blazing power and momentum. In between, the Russian-American pianist Natasha Paremski was the first-class soloist in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1.  As the Phil has apparently committed to a long-term occupation of the Scottish Rite Cathedral-Temple-Auditorium-Theater-Hall (depending on who and when you ask), readers might want to know about its acoustics. The orchestra was seated ahead of the proscenium – the best place for it, to judge from a few appearances decades ago by the Phil’s predecessor orchestra.  For the concert’s first half I sat in the first row of the right upper parquet section, a few feet within the balcony overhang. There, the acoutics were not bad, tantalyzingly close to excellent, with a generous but not overwhelming resonance and excellent projection. Main problem: In loud, densely scored passages, the sound was a little congested, as though the sound waves were getting in each other’s way. I’d guess a good acoustician could fix that without breaking the bank.  For the second half, I moved to the seventh row, deep inside the overhang, where I expected the sound to be more muffled. To my surprise, the sound back there was a notch or two cleaner and more open than in the more forward position, even in the most terrifying climaxes of the most terror-stricken Shostakovch symphony.  At both seating locations, the hall gave full scope to a very wide dynamic range and seemed to intensify the natural timbres of instruments in solo passages. Alas, both locations suffered from the lack of barriers to noise from the lobby.   All told, there’s ample reason for optimism, although the needed improvements to acoustics, accessibility, comfort, and cosmetics will require a bit more than $20 bucks and a roll of duct tape, as the leaders of San Antonio’s big charitable foundations and businesses probably expect.  Jeffrey Kahane is proving to be a conductor of the first rank. His account of the Shostakovich was compelling from first to last. He forged a totally unified structural arch, and he elicited pointed details from the orchestra. Perhaps most memorable was the second movement, an allegro that Kahane drove into presto territory. The orchestra gave that music a sharp edge of slashing anger, surely reflecting the Soviet-period composer’s torment under Stalin’s soul-crushing reign. Special notice goes to principal oboe Joshua Bullock and English horn Erin Mallard for beautiful solo work. The strings were in splendid shape. Seating was a little unusual –(from left to right) first violins with the basses behind them, cellos, violas, second violins. In the concerto’s quick outer movements, Paremski was a model of clarity, accuracy, and technical wizardry without a trace of gratuitous flash. She brought a dreamy, contemplative quality to the middle movement – and to her encore, not some show-offy dazzler, but the tender, fading whispers of Sergei Prokofiev’s piano solo arrangement of an excerpt from his “Romeo and Juliet” ballet music. Tate composed “Chokfi’” for the strings and percussion of a youth orchestra. The title is the Chickasaw word for “rabbit,” a trickster figure in some indigenous cultures of the American southwest. Its compact eight minutes are propelled by aptly tricky percussion rhythms that professionals can’t coast through, and its lyrical writing for strings demands silken playing. The performance was top-drawer. Mike Greenberg   

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SA Philharmonic/Jeffrey Kahane/Natasha Paremski

SA Philharmonic and music director Jeffrey Kahane take their bows in the orchestra’s new home, the Scottish Rite Hall.