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SA Symphony, conductor Christian Knapp
Lynn Harrell serves Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto at
peak of
ripeness
February 14, 2009
Cellist Lynn Harrell made a return visit to the San Antonio
Symphony on
Feb. 13 after an absence of many years. His vehicle this
time was
Edward Elgar’s Concerto in E Minor of 1919, and in it
Harrell revealed
the Romantic sensibility at the peak of ripeness -- that is,
still
crisp and tart.
The guest conductor was a young American, Christian Knapp,
who opened
with Beethoven’s “Leonore” Overture No. 3 and closed with
Igor
Stravinsky’s 1947 revised version of the “Petrushka” ballet
score.
Much of Elgar’s richly melodic concerto is brooding and
melancholy.
Harrell, declining to overstate the Angst, let the music
speak for
itself through honest means -- impeccable timing, incisive
rhythms, a
way of husbanding resources so that big gestures produced
big effects.
There was plenty of tender feeling in his beautifully
phrased account
of the slow movement, but he didn’t overplay the sentiment.
His
double-stops were meaty, his tone perhaps a bit less
generous than that
from some other instruments, but very nicely balanced.
Harrell offered an encore, an arrangement of Chopin’s
Nocturne in
E-flat, Op. 9, No. 2, in honor of his former students -- he
teaches at
Rice University’s Shepherd school of Music -- who now play
with this
orchestra.
(Many years ago, in a recital with pianist James Levine at
the Ravinia
Festival north of Chicago, the encore was a bit grander.
After playing
a full program, Harrell and Levine responded to the ovation
by
returning to the stage with three other musicians in tow --
violinist
Robert Mann of the Juilliard Quartet and bassist Joseph
Guastafeste of
the Chicago Symphony are the two I remember -- to play
Schubert’s
complete “Trout “ Quintet.” Now that was an encore.)
Knapp conducted Elgar stylishly, with a good sense of the
breadth and
mass of this music. In Beethoven and Stravinsky, however,
Knapp showed
more enthusiasm than craft. He started off very nicely,
getting a
lovely sheen from the strings in the Beethoven’s slow
introduction,
which the conductor shaped lovingly. But much that followed,
in both
Beethoven and Stravinsky, was out of focus. Ensemble was
often
imprecise, attacks were fuzzy. Knapp rendered the climactic
moments
with plenty of excitement, but the lines leading to those
climaxes
tended to be choppy. Insufficient care with balances and
dynamics left
even Stravinsky’s vividly colored score sometimes sounding
monochromatic. From my seat in the mezzanine, it appeared
that Knapp
spent too much time with his head bent down toward score and
too little
time communicating with the orchestra. I am obliged to
report, however,
that a musician, whose views I respect, liked Knapp’s work
quite a lot.
As usual, there wee many fine individual performances from
the
principals, especially from bassoonist Sharon Kuster in
“Petrushka.”
Mike
Greenberg
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