San Antonio Symphony News and Archive

Rising Tempo




From the San Antonio Express News 10/24/99

By Mike Greenberg



Benjamin Zander stands at risk of losing his ranking as one of the world's most underappreciated great conductors.

Now in the midst of two major series of Telarc recordings with London's important Philharmonia Orchestra, Zander is poised to break out of cult status and become a celebrity.

Tish-tush, he reassures his fans.

"I'm still not being called up by the big orchestras," he said by phone from Boston, where he teaches at the New England Conservatory and conducts the Boston Philharmonic, that city's community orchestra.

Happily, he is being called up by the better second-tier orchestras, including the San Antonio Symphony, which Zander will conduct this weekend.

His program includes Tchaikovsky's tragic Symphony No. 6 and Prokofiev's exuberant Piano Concerto No. 3, with Katia Skanavi the soloist in the concerto.

Zander previously appeared with the San Antonio Symphony early in 1998, when the orchestra was in such dire financial straits that he donated his fee to the cause and made a highly unusual plea for donations from the podium.

Those dramatic circumstances were eclipsed, however, by his lustrous performance with the orchestra in a concert that included a wholly fresh account of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 and an unutterably beautiful traversal of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 4.

Those two composers are at the core of Zander's widening reputation.

He reports that his Telarc recording of Mahler's Symphony No. 9 with the Philharmonia has sold 16,000 copies in the past nine months, an astonishing figure for a serious classical recording.

With Telarc and the Philharmonia, he's working on a complete cycle of the Beethoven symphonies - the Fifth and Seventh have been released on one set - and he says Telarc wants him to record the complete Mahler symphonies as well.

The recordings released thus far have something going for them beyond performances of radical depth, extraordinary insight and, above all, fearlessness, a commitment to following where the composer leads, to the limit of orchestral technique and human emotions.

Each set comes with an extra CD on which Zander analyzes and explains the music in great detail.

For the Mahler Ninth, for example, Zander in effect leads a conducting workshop. He talks about the role and interpretation of every phrase of the score's first two pages, which are also reproduced and included in the package, and how each phrase should be conducted physically.

He also speaks in fair detail about the entire work. Each passage he refers to is illustrated sonically with a snippet from the recording or Zander's own piano transcription.

Although his analysis is accessible to the layman and not highly technical, it is demanding and serious.

"This is a departure because the assumption is that everyone can follow this stuff. It's a revolutionary idea," Zander says. "I talk to a lot of groups of corporate leaders and the like, and many of them have bought that recording and have discovered that the Mahler Ninth is not elitist. Now the same has happened with the Beethoven Fifth."

In both the explanatory CDs and the performances, it is clear that Zander has mapped out his interpretations in minute detail.

"The element that is not controlled in that is what the orchestra brings. For example, on my arrival in San Antonio, yes, I have a clear idea of how the Tchaikovsky Sixth goes, but what happens depends on the orchestra. Ditto with the pianist. The moment she appears on the scene we've got a different animal."

He justly regards the Tchaikovsky Sixth as "an extremely difficult piece, one of the most notoriously problematic pieces in the repertoire, especially if you play it freely, as I do, with rubato feeling."

Thanks in part to his freedom of line, Zander's performances - live or recorded - do not sound fussed over or too pat.

He comes to the podium with a very firm idea of how the music should sound, but he recognizes that no performance in the real world is truly definitive.

"If music calls on all our resources of humanity and passion, as well as intellect and discipline, the performance will go down that path. But no one can do all that, so there will never be a perfect performance."



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