Tessa Lark   Photo: Lauren Desberg

“Make Our Garden Grow,” audio only, from the original cast album. Robert Rounseville as Candide, Barbara Cook as Cunegunde.

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Oct. 4, 2026 The debut concert of Harmonium of Texas, Oct. 2 in the Lila Cockrell Theatre, brought together a nimble, disciplined  symphony orchestra; three outstanding vocal soloists; a brillliant, indefatigable violin soloist; adult and children’s choruses in excellent form, capable teen instrumentalists augmenting the orchestra, and a highly skilled, dramatically astute conductor, Jeffrey Kahane, who is also an imaginative artistic director. What more could one wish? Oh, more resonance in the theatre would have been nice, but that’s about all the negativity I can muster. The main box-office draw for this concert was Carl Orff’s perennially popular cantata Carmina Burana (1937), set to medieval texts on the pleasures of dancng, drunkenness, and sex, bookended by the moderating influence of “Fortune, Empress of the World.” The concert opened with Antrópolis, a 2019 work by Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz. Tessa Lark was the ear-popping protagonist in American composer Michael Torke’s violin concerto titled Sky (2018). The opening works were related in the sense that both integrated folk or popular idioms with the extended structures and complexity of the “art music” tradition. The result in both cases was not to be confused with “crossover,”  a mongrel category that sells well but has little to say. Instead, each is a work of serious craft in which disparate influences meld into a unified style that stands on its own – and that has plenty to say. Ortiz deployed her serious craft to evoke a wild, sweaty, boozy, hoochie-koochie night on the town in Mexico City. The piece began with an arresting extended cadenza for timpani – an idea that would recur twice and, in a fair world, would have justified combat pay for the superb timpani principal, Peter Flamm. I noticed a few slight lapses in ensemble precision in the work’s very tricky rhythms, but wouldn’t it defeat the purpose of a bar crawl to make it too tidy? The majority (I count 47) of the musicians in the orchestra have previously been on the rosters of the San Antonio Symphony (1939-2022) and/or its successor, the San Antonio Philharmonic (2022-????). A stable roster is important to an orchestra’s cohesion and consistency from season to season, so Harmonium starts out in pretty good shape. I heard no significant faults among either the principals or the full sections.   For Carmina Burana, the orchestra was augmented by musicians from the Youth Orhestras of San Antonio – presumably from its advanced Philharmonic ensemble. They made their presence known only by enlarging the orchestra’s sound, not by producing errors. Their diretor is Troy Peters. The big Mastersingers Chorus and the UTSA Chamber Singers (both directed by Yoojin Muhn) and The Children’s Chorus of San Antonio (directed by Carolyn Cruse) made a huge but refined sound, with clear diction.  But the three vocal solists made the strongest impression. Baritone Christopher Rodriguez struggled a little with the highest falsetto notes in the parodistic love song “Dies, nox et omnia,” but otherwise his voice was ideally honeyed and substantial. Tenor Brian Giebler had a priceless tragi-comedic turn as a roasting swan in “Olim lacus colueram.” Soprano Rachele Gilmore’s satiny instrument was unalloyed pleasure.     Kahane and all his forces rewarded thunderous applause with an encore – one with special relevance at the present moment in our history. Leonard Bernstein’s Candide is, in my view, the  Great American Opera. Its closing ensemble, “Make Our Garden Grow,” encapsulates the entire American experience in just five lines of Richard Wilbur’s plain-spoken but supremely discerning poetry and Bernsein’s music, which expresses both uncertainty and hope, shadow and light:       We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good     We'll do the best we know.     We'll build our house and chop our wood     And make our garden grow...     And make our garden grow. And let us say Amen.                                                    Mike Greenberg     

Jeffrey Kahane conducts Harmonium of Texas, Mastersingers, members of Youth Orchestras of San Antonio, Children’s Chorus of San Antonio, and University of Texas San Antonio Chamber Singers, soprano Rachele Gilmore, tenor Brian Giebler, and baritone Christopher Rodriguez in Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, Oct. 2, 2026, in Lila Cockrell Theatre. Photo: Mike Greenberg

Mr. Torke wrote Sky for Ms. Lark, drawing on the folk  idioms of her native Kentucky and of her own family – her father is a bluegrass musician. Mr. Torke’s program note identifies banjo-picking technique as the source for the tornadic solo line in the first movement, Irish reels as the source for the introspective (and gorgeous) second, and fiddle licks for the third.  The composer's note also states: “Everything is written out, nothing improvised.” That isn’t totally accurate. In all three movements, but most prominently in the second (“Wistful”) Ms. Lark inserted little glissandi (sliding notes) and pitch inflections that are not notated but are expected in bluegrass-fiddling. Without them the long melodic lines wouold have still been beautiful, but the ornaments magnified the poignancy.

Harmonium of Texas, Mastersingers, Jeffrey Kahane, etc. 

An auspicious debut

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