SA Symphony, SLL, Cecile Licad
In Bruckner's Sixth, pleasures of the spirit
November 9, 2013The dualistically inclined might have expected he San Antonio Symphony’s program for this weekend to divide neatly between flesh and spirit — the plush sensuality of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s very popular Piano Concerto No. 2, followed by the chastening fire of Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 6.
Happily, the reality Friday night in the Majestic Theatre was more complex. The pianist Cecile Licad found a world of human nuance beneath the concerto’s opulent surface, and music director Sebastian Lang-Lessing’s fleet mountaineering up the Bruckner’s craggy slopes made it a frankly pleasurable experience.
The concert came shortly after the welcome news that Mr. Lang-Lessing’s contract has been extended for five years.
In a 21010 interview, not long after his appointment as music director, Mr. Lang-Lessing made known his intention to fill the long-standing Bruckner gap in the orchestra’s programming. He closed the 2011-12 season with a seamless, deeply musical account of the Seventh Symphony, probably the most accessible and popular of the series. The seldom-performed Sixth is a much tougher nut to crack, especially in the finale, whose argument is interrupted again and again by fits and starts and backtracks.
At least, that’s how it usually seems. But in this performance, that nettlesome finale — indeed, the whole symphony — seemed entirely cogent and unified. The trick was Mr. Lang-Lessing’s mastery of tempo relations, which (together with his superb sense of line, a generally quick pace and some breathtaking accelerandi) united the episodes into a continuous coiling advance. The fractures didn’t impede the flow, but were opportunities to build up steam and propel the music forward. Too, as we’ve come to expect, the conductor fully expressed the score’s big dynamic contrasts and often-overlooked details — for example, the heart-heaving crescendo in the double-basses at the start of the slow movement, and the cellos’ deeply affecting “pulled” (gezogen) descending line near its end.
Apart from some slight intonation lapses in the first violins’ high end, the strings produced a very beautiful, transparent sound, especially radiant in the slow movement’s coda, which anticipates Mahler. Among the excellent woodwinds, oboist Hideaki Okada made especially beautiful contributions. The whole brass contingent deserves special mention for fitting into the overall texture, exerting its authority without bullying. (Not long ago I was appalled by the deafening vulgarity of a very famous American orchestra’s brass in the Bruckner Sixth. I won’t mention the name of the orchestra, but it resides in a Midwestern town where a man was once seen dancing with his wife.)
If Ms. Licad did not quite match the technical bravura of Lang Lang, who essayed Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto here in 2011, the shades of meaning and mood she brought to this staple more than compensated. She allowed the opening statement to build gradually from pensiveness to power. Her very flexible phrasing and coloristic effects seemed to portray a character, almost as a fine actor would. The slow movement floated dreamily, but also with a wonderful feeling of movement through a yielding medium, like tall grasses. Principal clarinet Ilya Shterenberg joined the soloist in a particularly lovely dialog.
Mr. Lang-Lessing got a very lush sound from the orchestra, although it sometimes overpowered the soloist. The violas had a gorgeous line in the first movement.
Mike Greenberg
