SA Symphony, Chang, Grams
Violinist gives old master new energy
March 28, 2009Johannes Brahms’s Violin Concerto has a distinguished history with the San Antonio Symphony. Yehudi Menuhin, then in his 20s, was the first to perform it here, in 1943. More recently it’s been essayed by Cho-Liang Lin in 2002 and Joshua Bell in 1993. On March 27, Sarah Chang continued that impressive line with a performance of extraordinary intensity and personal conviction.
Guest conductor Andrew Grams and the orchestra opened the Majestic Theater program with a cleanly rendered, intelligently detailed account of Bela Bartok’s virtuosic Concerto for Orchestra. The crowd, nicely stocked with high school students, was one of the largest the symphony has seen in recent years.
Brahms’s music in general, and the Violin Concerto in particular, represent the apex of a classically rooted approach to Romanticism -- passionate and dramatic, fully exploiting the resources of the large symphony orchestra and of instruments built to project bigger sounds, but also guided by the values of formal clarity, ordered complexity and, for want of a better term, heroic optimism.
It is perhaps not altogether irrelevant that Chang wore a hyper-red clingy-slinky dress with a floor-sweeping caboose that swirled as she stalked restlessly to and fro. This was a bold. vivid, highly physical performance in which every phrase bristled with life, and many courted risks. Chang could play with pristine sweetness, but she didn’t make a fetish of beautiful tone. Her expressive and coloristic range seemed limitless. She could make her instrument meow like a kitten or sigh ethereally, but she also could produce violent downbow thrusts. The cadenza in the first movement was feverish, nearly approaching delirium. There was a fully contemporary, urban energy in her playing -- the music sue didn't sound like it was over 130 years old -- but she always was attentive to the long line and the cogent paragraph.
Grams did a splendid job of meshing the orchestra with Chang’s phrasing, most beautifully in the delicate material following the first-movement cadenza.
In the Bartok, Grams’s tempos were sometimes too deliberate in the first and third movements, which wanted more of a sense of direction and flow.
Otherwise, the performance was very nicely put together, with big dynamics and fully expressed details. The jocular passage in the middle of the fourth movement was delivered broadly enough to elicit some laughs from the audience. The finale, briskly paced, was very exciting indeed. The orchestra was in excellent form.
Mike
Greenberg
