San Antonio Symphony
Meticulous craftsman meets meticulous craftsman
October 9, 2010If it is impossible not to think of Mickey Mouse when one hears “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” it is equally impossible not to marvel at the meticulous craftsmanship of the composer, Paul Dukas.
The musical evocation of the broomstick bucket brigade opened the first concert of the San Antonio Symphony’s subscription series, Oct. 8 in the Majestic Theater. Guest conductor Christopher Seaman, also a meticulous craftsman, led the proceedings. The concert closed with Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 2, “London.” The centerpiece was Frederic Chopin’s Piano Concerto in F Minor, with Jeffrey Swann the excellent soloist.
Though he had a long career as a composer and teacher (at the Paris Conservatoire), Dukas left only a half-dozen or so major works, and he deemed at least that many other compositions worthy of destruction. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” based on a poem by Goethe, exemplifies his perfectionism. It is a beautifully unified, compact conception, realized with a great flair for orchestral color and a textural complexity that is always in balance.
Seaman got a glistening, transparent performance from the orchestra, and all manner of details emerged clearly without interrupting the flow. The bassoons were terrific, and the strings played with sheen.
I confess an inability to muster any affection for Chopin’s concerto, which consists of a solo part of no particular distinction beyond its overdecorated virtuosity, glued to an orchestral score of no distinction whatever. The thing just sits there like a lump of week-old tapioca pudding.
But the Steinway sounded clear and full-throated under Swann’s hands, he delivered the concerto’s many mercurial runs with crystalline delicacy, and he declined the temptation to excessive sentimentality.
Seaman closed last season (and his two-year stint as the orchestra’s artistic adviser) with a superb account of Edward Elgar’s Symphony No. 1, and the conductor again drew from his native England to open this season with
Vaughan Williams’s “London” Symphony, composed just before the outbreak of the Great War, a few years later than the Elgar. It’s rather like the sound track for a travelogue, portraying London’s fog, bustling street life and Westminster chimes. The piece has its charms, and it reveals a composer who is a brilliant orchestrator and an enterprising, sometimes daring harmonist. Some passages are exquisitely lovely, some thrillingly bold, and many leave one awash in treacle, or looking wistfully at one’s watch.
The performance, at any rate, was splendid all around, with particularly fine playing from Stephanie Shapiro on English horn.
Mike
Greenberg
