San Antonio Symphony
Venturing into the baroque
April 14, 2012A quartet of stylish vocal soloists and strong singing from the Mastersingers chorus were the main attractions in a rare baroque concert by the San Antonio Symphony under guest conductor Patrick Dupré Quigley, April 13 in the Majestic Theatre.
There are good reasons why modern American symphony orchestras do not often program music from the time before Mozart and Haydn, other than the obligatory "Messiah" of Handel. The repertoire generally wants chamber-sized forces, relegating many musicians to the metaphorical bench, and chamber-sized halls. The rise of specialist ensembles has acclimated many in the audience to the sound of historically appropriate instruments and historically informed performance practice.
That is not to say that modern orchestras shouldn’t include baroque music in their programming mix. Bach, Handel, Vivaldi and Charpentier, the composers represented on this program, are certainly worth hearing, and modern orchestras need to be versatile enough to play their music persuasively, even if not quite “authentically,” whatever that means. With the right conductor and sufficient experience in the style, they can.
The results in this particular concert were sometimes winning, sometimes not.
On the debit side, orchestral ensemble was too often loose, and Mr. Quigley, though attentive to the range of styles represented on the program, wasn’t very attentive to the musical specifics of each piece. The Bach Suite No. 3 in D, BWV 1068, suffered most from this treatment. It sorely wanted rhythmic punch in the quicker movements, the famous Air was taken much too slowly and gloopily, and the whole took on a dully genteel homogeneity. (No complaints, however, about concertmaster du jour Bonnie Terry’s snappy solo work in the Overture.) Mr. Quigley was a bit more interesting in Leopold Stokowski’s massive, granitic arrangement of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, which opened the program as an intentional reminder of a previous era’s strange ideas about Bach. The conductor’s fairly clinical approach to this garish score had the merit of deromanticizing it.
In the rest of the program, the Mastersingers and the excellent vocal and orchestral soloists occupied the foreground.
In Vivaldi’s solo cantata “In furore iustissimae irae,” soprano Teresa Wakim’s gleaming, agile instrument made thrilling leaps to the stratosphere, with all the high notes landing cleanly. Her ornamentation was enterprising but not excessive, fitting naturally into the contours of the music. She paired nicely with the limpid tenor Zachary Wilder and the Mastersingers in Handel’s Chandos Anthem No. 4. Sometimes a little too much vibrato sneaked into Ms Wakim’s singing, but that’s a minor complaint.
In Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Te Deum, Ms. Wakim and Mr. Wilder were joined by the elegant, completely secure countertenor Reginald Mobley, bass-baritone Charles Evans and the Mastersingers. On the orchestral side, trumpets John Carroll and Lauren Eberhart made some impressive contributions.
The Mastersingers’ crisp diction and ample power shone throughout, but most especially in Handel’s celebratory “Zadok the Priest.”
Mike Greenberg
