SA Symphony
High craft on the podium,
poetry on the guitar
February 14, 2010A glorious performance of Carl Nielsen’s heroic Symphony No. 4, “The Inextinguishable,” capped one of the San Antonio Symphony’s strongest showings in recent memory, Feb. 12 in the Majestic Theater.
The guest conductor was David Angus, music director of the widely respected Glimmerglass Opera in upstate New York. Guitarist Manuel Barrueco was the soloist in the concert’s centerpiece, Joaquín Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez.”
The concert opened with Franz Joseph Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony.
There seemed to be very little ego in Angus’s conducting, and much integrity. His podium technique was efficient and unshowy. He was an open window to the music rather than a self-conscious interpreter of it. Performances in this “composer’s advocate” vein can be more admirable than compelling, but Angus managed to combine both attributes.
His Haydn was fresh, crisp and lively, with a wonderful lyrical line (a reminder that Haydn was an important composer of operas) and a transparent orchestral sound. The rhythms were ideally realized, right down to the galumphing rusticity of this symphony’s very unaristocratic Minuet. The orchestra responded with taut, alert ensemble.
During the years 1914 to 1916, while much of Europe was in the midst of the most extravagant death-making in the history of the world, Nielsen composed his Fourth Symphony as a testament to the will to life.There is a moment of calm in the second movement, and an acknowledgement of tragedy in the mournful third, but the opening and closing allegros are dramatic tumults with optimistic lyrical cores. The finale, with its antiphonal dueling timpani, is violent at times, but it is the violence of life struggling against all that would suppress it, and triumphing.
It’s a score that can easily fly apart, but Angus held it together in big, unified paragraphs with a clear destination always in mind. The colors were bold, the tempo relations ideal, the surfaces clean and polished. The orchestra was in superb form all around.
Barrueco was a poetic and stylish soloist in Rodrigo’s concerto. Though born in Cuba and educated in the United States, Barrueco brought a startlingly authentic flamenco brusqueness and color range to the first movement. Loneliness and yearning were palpable in his account of the slow movement -- in dialogue with Stephanie Shapiro’s gorgeous playing on English horn -- and he delivered the virtuosic cadenza with rare fluidity. Amplification was unavoidable, of course, but it was handled well. The guitar sound was warm and nicely in balance with the orchestra.
Mike
Greenberg
