San Antonio Symphony with Kuerti, Kuster
A luminous intro to Webern,
for the wary
March 27, 2010Two compelling, underexposed Modern works traded jabs with music from more-familiar territory in the San Antonio Symphony’s March 26 concert, led with infectious energy by guest conductor Julian Kuerti.
From the Modern treasure trove came Béla Bartók’s Divertimento for String Orchestra and Anton Webern’s Passacaglia. Also from the early 20th century, but looking back to the 19th and 18th, was a suite from Richard Strauss’s opera “Der Rosenkavalier.” The 18th century proper was represented by Mozart’s sunny Bassoon Concerto, with the orchestra’s own Sharon Kuster the estimable soloist.
Webern, a student of Arnold Schoenberg’s who refined the 12-tone system in music of meticulous construction, gem-like clarity and extreme concision, is regarded with awe by the musical academy. Conservative audiences, cheating themselves, have tended to hear his music reluctantly and with puzzlement or outright hostility.
Sebastian Lang-Lessing, the San Antonio Symphony’s music director designate, counts himself among the admirers and hopes to include at least some of Webern’s handful of orchestral works in coming seasons.
The Passacaglia, from 1908, serves as a good introduction to the wary. Predating Webern’s adoption of 12-tone style, it fits (just barely) within the ambit of late-Romantic, chromatic harmony. The form is familiar from the baroque period -- a short bass line (in this case, an eight-note motive played by pizzicato strings) is repeated (in this case, 23 times) with melodic variations, many of them exceedingly elaborate and as texturally dense as anything in Richard Strauss, some delicate and spare, with fragmented melodic lines, closer to Webern’s mature style. The repetitions of the underlying motive give the listener a point of reference that aids appreciation of both extremes.
The performance was transparent, handsomely made and precisely played. Kuerti’s organic shaping of phrases made this music seem more lyrical than lapidary, a highly persuasive approach.
Kuerti’s strongly pointed rhythms and sense of line, together with polished playing by the symphony’s strings, made a convincing case for Bartok’s Divertimento of 1939. This music is less familiar than Bartok’s splashier full-orchestra scores, with their bold, saturated colors, but the composer managed to wrest quite a lot of color and percussive rhythms from the strings alone. The three movements are unrelated, but each is a very substantial work. The two outer allegros are especially notable for exploring far afield from their cheery, folk-influenced opening material.
The “Rosenkavalier” Suite -- the one that was probably assembled by conductor Artur Rodzinski with Strauss’s blessing in 1944 -- got a juicy, robust, bursting-at-the-seams performance. Kuerti’s sculpting of tempos might have been excessive here and there, but he won points by emphasizing the wall-of-sound sumptuousness of the score. (The term is apropos: Phil Spector derived his distinctive layered style of rock music production from Strauss and Wagner.) The performance was virtuosic all around, with particularly beautiful tone from principal oboe Mark Ackerman in the exquisite music from the Act III trio.
Kuster, the symphony’s veteran principal bassoonist, can turn a phrase as well as anyone in the business, and the flexible singing line was constantly front and center in her playing of the Mozart concerto. There was, too a rhythmic spritziness, like the wink of an eye. And though this is not, for the most part, a showy concerto, it did put on display Kuster’s very impressive ability to dash off rapid-fire staccato passages. Fastest tongue in the West.
Mike
Greenberg
