SA Symphony with Lintu, Groh: An electric evening of power and light
May 17, 2008Did lightning strike the Majestic Theater on May 16? It certainly seemed so when young Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu drove the San Antonio Symphony through one of its most luminous concerts in my experience.
German pianist Markus Groh collaborated with Lintu in the evening's centerpiece, a compelling, fully contemporary reconsideration of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 in G. Flanking it were works by two of Lintu's countrymen -- Einojuhani Rautavaara's iridescent "Lintukoto" ("Isle of Bliss") and Jean Sibelius's blazing Symphony No. 2 in a flat-out glorious performance.
The Beethoven performance was the most interesting of the three, in part because one doesn't expect to hear much new in so familiar and hallowed a score.
Concerto performances are usually like first dates, the soloist and conductor agreeing in advance on the general outlines of the evening and then aiming mainly to be pleasant and avoid stepping on each other's toes. I don't know if Groh and Lintu had worked together previously, but their performance in the Beethoven was more like an established marriage, with deeply engrained shared goals and understandings. This was one of the most unitary and cohesive concerto performances I've heard.
It was also the sort of performance that might arouse opposing passions and factions. Although both partners honored Beethoven's commands regarding dynamics and articulation -- what a beautiful pianissimo Lintu got from the strings! -- they showed no reverence for the received wisdom on matters about which Beethoven was silent, especially tempos and balances. The Fourth Concerto has generally been regarded as the most "Mozartean" of the five, and Groh's cleanly defined technique followed suit, but very generous shaping of tempos and Lintu's coloristic approach to orchestral balances pushed the performance style into the Romantic spirit of Liszt or even, in Lintu's work with the strings in the slow movement, of Mahler and early Schoenberg. It was the sort of interventionism that puritanical types, present writer included, might ordinarily find objectionable, but the results were utterly convincing. Musicians can create a large space for interpretive freedom if they get the fundamentals of rhythm, structure and technique right, and these guys did.
Groh was a marvel from first to last. He summoned a wonderful variety of tone color in the cadenza of the first movement. (To answer a question from someone in the audience, it was one of the two cadenzas that Beethoven himself wrote for the first movement.) His third-movement cadenza was brilliantly explosive. His touch was elegant but powerful, his tone always clean. His legato playing in the slow movement was beautiful and pristine and poetic, perfectly responding to the orchestra's gruff harrumphs.
Lintu conducted the Beethoven without a baton and achieved a very intimate connection with the orchestra, which responded with vigor, spirit and unity. The balances were often amazingly beautiful.
Above all, Groh and Lintu made this concerto fully their own. It was not a museum piece, not a historical artifact, but an expression of the here and now.
Have I already said the Sibelius was glorious?: Let me say it again: The Sibelius was glorious. Lintu forged each of the four movements, especially the first, into a unitary whole. Music that often seems episodic hung together as a cohesive paragraph with an unstoppable forward motion. Lintu brought out details that I'd never noticed before, especially in the woodwinds, but all of them seemed to emerge from the logic of the larger structure. For all the thought and analysis that went into this performance, it never came across as analytical. On the contrary, it was a force of nature, a pure adrenalin rush, as exciting and intuitive a performance as anyone could wish.
And how on earth did Lintu get such a huge and lustrous sound from the San Antonio Symphony's understaffed strings, which ordinarily can play either beautifully or loudly, but not both at the same time?
Rautavaara's "Isle of Bliss," composed in 1995, pretty well matches its name. In its dreamy, weightless feeling it recalls one of Sibelius's loveliest scores, the "Swan of Tuonelah," though with modern melodic contours and an approach to tonal harmony that sounds, to my ear, favorably influenced by 12-tone techniques.
Lintu is a tall drink of water, and when he used a baton (in Sibelius and Rautavaara) the resulting physical gestures were mighty big. That may account for some minor and fleeting lapses in ensemble precision. It was very obvious that the orchestra liked him, trusted his instincts and wanted to play their best for him. They did. On this night, an excellent orchestra played like a great one. The few specks of dust probably would disappear the next time he comes to visit.
Will there be a next time? Let us hope so.
Although there is no reason to think that Lintu might be a candidate for the vacant post of music director, and he might be beyond this orchestra's financial capability, the sort of electricity he generated on the podium is probably the only way for the San Antonio Symphony to expand its skmpy audience, gain international recognition and assure a future for itself.
Mike
Greenberg
