San Antonio Symphony, Alban Gerhardt
Pitching in Lang-Lessing's wheelhouse
May 21, 2011Since taking the helm of the San Antonio Symphony at the start of this season, Sebastian Lang-Lessing has amply demonstrated his special affinity for the German classical and Romantic repertoire. He’s led superb performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge (in Felix Weingartner’s arrangement) and Mendelssohn’s “Lobgesang.”
The concert of May 21 extended that record with symphonies by Mozart (an Austrian, but close enough) and Beethoven and, most impressively, two forward-looking works by Robert Schumann, for whom Mr. Lang-Lessing’s affinity deepens into intimacy -- the astonishing “Manfred” Overture and the Cello Concerto in A Minor. Alban Gerhardt, remembered for his luminous account of the Saint-Saens Concerto in A Minor in 2007, returned to apply his electrifying, athletic musicianship to Schumann’s essay in the same key.
Schubert and Beethoven, and even Mozart and Haydn before them, had prepared the ground for the German flavor of musical Romanticism, but the style attained full flower in Schumann. (The French flavor blossomed at about the same time in the music of Hector Berlioz.) The “Manfred” Overture, from Schumann’s 1852 incidental music for Lord Byron’s play about a nobleman haunted by sexual guilt, is nervous, dark, hounded. Melodic lines coil and pace restlessly. This is music that’s all about emotions.
Mr. Lang-Lessing’s traversal was most notable for his very generous molding of tempos to heighten tension, for balances that emphasized the orchestration’s deep-purple colorations, and for fully expressing the music’s seemingly uncontainable energy and feeling within a seamless architectural unity.
In the concerto, the same degree of engagement was audible in the orchestra behind Mr. Gerhardt, and in his own solo performance. His tone was limpid, rather brighter than I recall from his previous appearance here, with sweet, silken highs and deliciously growling lows. He delivered rapid passagework with snappy assurance, though clarity sometimes was sacrificed to dramatic urgency. The piece often demands muscular and aggressive playing, at which Mr. Gerhardt excels, but he was equally compelling in delicate, lyrical mode, as in the brief slow movement. Special notice goes to the orchestra’s principal cellist, Kenneth Freudigman, for some lovely playing in dialogue with the soloist.
Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony appears infrequently on concert programs, but this performance will be followed less than a year later by another, as part of the orchestra’s traversal of all the Beethoven symphonies under Mr. Lang-Lessing next season. Overkill? Hardly.
As Mr. Lang-Lessing told the Majestic Theater audience, he loves the compositional dexterity of this piece, among Beethoven’s sunniest and wittiest works. The affection showed in the conductor’s energetic pacing, in the care he took with certain lines that usually fade into the background, in his robust rhythms and in the prominence he gave to the low strings, not just the foundation but the propeller of this performance.
Mozart’s “Paris” Symphony, which opened the concert, found the strings a little imprecise (they were splendid in the rest of the concert), but on the whole the performance was pleasing. The horns and trumpets blended into the overall texture in a way that’s not often heard outside of period-instruments ensembles.
Mike
Greenberg
