San Antonio Symphony, conductor Andrew Grams
And the beat goes where?
April 4, 2010The San Antonio Symphony and its volunteer Mastersingers chorus had a frustrating night on April 2 under guest conductor Andrew Grams.
The program in the Majestic Theater opened with English choral works of the 20th century -- Ralph Vaughan Williams’s lovely if slightly somniferous “Serenade to Music” and Gustav Holst’s alternately dramatic and ecstatic “The Hymn of Jesus” -- and closed in French Romantic territory with Camille Saint-Saens’s monumental Symphony No. 3. David Heller of San Antonio was the organist in the Saint-Saens.
Throughout the evening, Grams showed a fine sense of each work’s distinctive style and feeling -- in Vaughan Williams, the serene, misty atmosphere and the bloom-and-fade rhythm of phrases; in Holst, the trenchancy and the disciplined boldness of gesture; in Saint-Saens, the Romantic sweep.
But only in the stately motion of the “Serenade to Music” did the conductor’s grasp match his reach. Both Holst and Saint-Saens suffered from a baton technique that was graceful and pretty but which too often forced the orchestra and chorus to play a frantic game of “Where’s Waldo?” with the beat. From my perspective in the mezzanine, it often appeared that the beat was sort of approximately more-or-less HERE-ish. The orchestra responded with its sloppiest ensemble in recent memory. The generally reliable Mastersingers, prepared by the consistently able John Silantien, sounded weak and tentative in Holst, though the chorus sang cleanly and with confidence in the “Serenade to Music,” which poses fewer challenges. In Saint-Saens, Grams did not always weave episodes effectively into a unified whole.
Heller did a fine job in both the Saint-Saens symphony and, in the background, in Holst. Making its first appearance at a San Antonio Symphony concert was the San Antonio Community Organ, an Allen Q345 that uses sampled sounds recorded from actual pipe organs. It’s a great improvement over the electronically synthesized sounds of yore. There was one unavoidable drawback to an instrument that moves around from venue to venue: Pedal notes didn’t couple evenly or consistently with the acoustics of the space. That quibble aside, the instrument is a welcome addition to the local music landscape. Thanks are due to the Bruce and Anne Johnson Charitable Foundation for making it available to arts organizations.
Mike
Greenberg
