San Antonio Symphony, Barry Douglas
Three (plus three) pieces in old style
May 5, 2012The pianist and conductor Barry Douglas presided over three familiar works from the classical period (loosely speaking) and one modern throwback in a luxuriously played concert by the San Antonio Symphony, May 4 in the Majestic Theatre.
As the soloist (conducting from the piano) in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K. 466, Mr. Douglas played with firm articulation, clear lines and a gleaming if sometimes hard-edged tone. Interpretively, he was the soul of modesty and restraint at the keyboard. The central Romanze unfolded with admirable directness but no want of feeling. In the outer allegros, directness verged on abstraction, a trait that was heightened by contrast with the pianist’s own souped-up, Romantic-style cadenzas.
As a conductor, Mr. Douglas got cushy surfaces and somewhat viscous articulation from the orchestra in the Mozart concerto, in Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 “London” and even in Rossini’s overture to “La Cenerentola.” The sonics were often beautiful, but the Rossini wanted vivacity while Haydn wanted transparency and, in the minuet, rhythmic punch. For all his clarity as a Mozart pianist, Mr. Douglas's treatment of the orchestra in Haydn and Mozart, especially, took on a velvet-draped heaviness that was out of sync with our contemporary understanding of classical performance practice.
The program’s odd man out was the 20th-century Polish composer Henryk Gorecki, represented by Three Pieces in Old Style for string orchestra. The first and third pieces are slow and churchy, the middle one lively. The whole lasts only about 10 minutes, and the music is disarmingly simple on its surface, based on brief repeated figures, strictly modal and often triadic in harmony, but with dense, radiant, constantly shifting textures that are both modern and medieval in feeling. Gorecki found ways to make the strings evoke bells and organ pipes. Mr. Douglas was in full sympathy with the aesthetic, and the performance was strong.
On the sidewalk before the concert, several of the orchestra’s musicians (at risk of being trampled by a horde of abnormally fit runners) handed attendees leaflets noting that “contract negotiations have been going on for more than a year,” complaining that “we are working for the same wages today that we were earning in 2001” and asking, “How will this lost decade of stagnation get the SASO to the $10M budget it needs to be successful in the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts?”
The more things change….
In some ways, San Antonio has changed markedly over the past decade. Those runners on Houston Street on Friday nights, the many cyclists actually using our bike paths, the thousands of new apartments in and near downtown, the flowering of excellent new restaurants, the growth in our population of young professionals, technocrats and artists, the investment in the Tobin Center, due to open in 2014 -- all this and more indicate a city of quickly rising ambition, capacity and confidence. Yet our symphony orchestra, and many of our other arts institutions, are still on shamefully short rations.
But don’t get me started.
Mike Greenberg
