San Antonio Symphony News and Archive

Paid-in-full orchestra plays poetic concert




By Mike Greenberg

from the San Antonio Express News 5/30/98



The central challenge in setting good poetry to music is deciding what to do with the music that's already in the poem.

Two vastly different responses to that challenge were the major works on Thursday's concert by the San Antonio Symphony. Music director Christopher Wilkins conducted the program, the closer for the orchestra's financially troubled 59th season, asssisted by the Mastersingers and vocal soloists.

The orchestra's cash crisis has abated in recent weeks. On Wenesday, the musicians and staff received the paychecks that were due May 15, and full checks were paid Friday for the scheduled biweekly payday.

Orchestra committee chairman Lee Hipp, the symphony's principal tubist, said Friday "all indications are" that musicians also will receive full paychecks June 5, the final payday of the season.

"We know we are ending the season in much stronger financial shape than we were expecting a month ago," Wilkins told the audience on Thursday, before launching the concert's major work, Rachmaninoff's "The Bells."

Edgar Allan Poe's flexibly propulsive, organic pulse, heart and soul of the original poem, scarcely appears in Rachmaninoff's choral setting of a Russian-language reworking, performed here in a retranslation back into English to preserve Rachmaninoff's rhythms rather than Poe's.

On its own terms, however, this is a wonderful piece, full of subtle colorations and intricate textures that effectively convey a peculiarly Russian, spiritualist slant on the meaning of the text, if not its rhythmic life.

The slow movement, wedding bells, recalls the harmonic atmosphere of "Tristan und Isolde," and the third movement's rising tide of alarm bells makes a brilliantly exciting, carefully controlled noise.

Baritone soloist Timothy Jones was the strongest of the vocal soloists, delivering an emotionally vivid account of the final movement's mourning bells. In the ecstatic song of the second movement, soprano Susan von Reichenbach's warm core voice was marred by a brassy edge in the upper register. Tenor Carl Halvorson sang attractively but wanted heft in the sleigh bells of the first movement.

The extensive English horn solo was beautifully played by Stephanie Shapiro, and the orchestra wasin top shape all around.

The road to Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor "Hiawatha's Wedding Feast" begins in Finland in the 1830s, when Elias Loennrot compiled old Finnish songs and ballads into the national epic, "Kalevala."

The hypnotic beat of "Kalevala," a trochaic tetrameter, was picked up in America by Henry Wadsworth Longfellowfor his epic poem "The Song of Hiawatha." The constant meter is central to the poetry.

Coleridge-Taylor retained much of the original wavelike meter and reflected its repetitive character in a repetitive melody.

Alas, his musical idiom, an Elgaresque soup with a soupcon of wagner but not a whit of those composers' capacity to astonish, made the whole thing rather a bore. The generic 1890s grandiosity seemed more attuned to England's imperial smugness of the period than to the lean musculature of the poetry.

The Mastersingers had a lot to do in both pieces, and the results fell a shade below the choir's usual level of precision and tonal purity under director John Silantien.



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