SA Symphony, LA Guitar Quartet
New Assad concerto is the draw, but conductor Vajda is the
marvel
February 7, 2009The Los Angeles Guitar Quartet and a new concerto composed for it by Sergio Assad helped fill the seats for the San Antonio Symphony’s concert of Feb. 6, while guest conductor Gregory Vajda and the orchestra filled the mind and ears with cogent, impeccably crafted accounts of standard works by Beethoven and Ravel.
Assad’s concerto, titled “Interchange,” was commissioned by the Southwest Guitar Festival, which runs through Feb. 8. Much of the audience for Friday’s concert consisted of festival participants. Doubtless they were pleased that the concerto gave the LA Guitar Quartet ample opportunities to display its virtuosity as an ensemble and as four excellent soloists -- John Dearman, William Kanengiser, Scott Tennant and Matthew Greif.
Each of the first four movements is a kind of character piece meant to reflect the musical interests of one of the players. Assad’s own musical sympathies are just about limitless, and he draws on many traditions in this work -- Sephardic chant, flamenco, jazz, Assad’s native Brazil. The fifth and last movement brings together the ideas from the first four. The combinations of seasonings are consistently interesting, and though Assad delivers no memorable tunes, his melodic lines are venturesome. There’s a good amount of color in the orchestra, and especially from the percussion, though in some patches the orchestration seems generically Hollywoody.
The main problem with “Interchange” is that it contains so many ideas that it ends up being more of a miscellany than a unified piece. Still, it has many winning moments, and a long life in the concerto repertoire seems likely.
Vajda deserves an unqualified rave for his work with the orchestra in Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin” and Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony.
In Ravel, Vajda got a miraculously transparent, shimmeringly beautiful sound from the strings, each section of which was reduced by one desk. The performance style was French to the bone -- precise, delicate, with a seamless, fluid sense of line.
It is commonly supposed that the toughest challenge for a musician, as for most artists, is to make the product of hard labor seem effortless, intuitive and natural. Actually, it’s just about impossible to make music sound effortless, intuitive and natural if you don’t put in a lot of sweaty labor first in the form of analysis. Vajda’s “Eroica” was fleet, organic, like a single untethered song from beginning to end. It was hard not to be simply carried away on its wings. But above all, it was tightly focused. Again and again, in a balance here, a tempo relation there, the connecting of ideas everywhere, everything made sense in the context of the whole.
The orchestra was in top form. All the woodwind principals played splendidly, and the horns were terrific, in the Beethoven.
Mike
Greenberg
