San Antonio Symphony News and Archive

My wish list for Wilkins' swan songs




From the San Antonio Express-News 10/24/99

By Mike Greenberg



If you were in the San Antonio Symphony audience last weekend, the thrill of hearing a great concert was probably tinged with a sense of impending loss.

Music director Christohper Wilkins has clearly come of age.

He has always been impressive for his elegant technique, his penchant for clarity and structural integrity, his impeccable sense of rhythm, his sheer love of music.

But Wilkins' accounts of the Shostakovich Symphony No. 5 and the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 1, with pianist Valeri Grokhovski in brilliant form, revealed new resources of elemental passion and intuition.

It wasn't a fluke. The season's opening concert, too, found Wilkins possessed by the music.

And just now, as he is entering his interpretive maturity, he's getting ready to leave.

Between concerts this fall and winter, Wilkins will be charting the program for his final season as music director of this orchestra. No doubt he's approaching the task with full appreciation of its importance.

He doesn't need my advice, but I can't resist putting in a few requests. There are some pieces that we simply must hear Wilkins conduct before he leaves us.

For example, there's Carl Ruggles' "Sun Treader," a craggy, radiant mountain of a work, a 20th century American classic. It demands the sort of technique Wilkins owns in abundance, and it would show off the orchestra's splendid brass.

Richard Strauss' "Metamorphoses," a luminous, deeply affecting elegy for 23 solo strings, is also made for Wilkins' way of clarifying lines, and this orchestra now has the depth of talent to pull it off convincingly.

Probably Wilkins' greatest strength is in the French repertoire, which includes many treasures that haven't been performed here lately, or at all.

One good French bet: Francis Poulenc's "The Model Animals" is a tender, enchanting work and one that can't fail to please the audience. Albert Roussel's "The Spider's Feast" is another charmer.

There's still lots of Latin American territory to explore. One strong candidate, full of Amazonian mystery: Heitor Villa-Lobos' "Uriburu."

Some Gustav Mahler will be indespensable. But which work?

On one hand, it would be interesting to hear what Wilkins might do with the Ninth Symphony, now that he is conducting more freely and with passion equal to his clarity and elegance.

On the other hand, San Antonio baritone Timothy Jones is interested in "Songs on the Death of Children." On the third hand, "The Song of the Earth" may be the best fit for Wilkins.

We'll need some big choral works to put the Mastersingers through their paces.

One work that seems especially suited to Wilkins' style is Jean Sibelius' "Kullervo," a dark, stark and powerful symphonic poem based on an episode from the "Kalevala," Finland's national epic. It calls for a male chorus, so maybe the Alamo City Men's Chorale could be recruited to add its voices to the men of the Mastersingers.

For his valedictory performance, I can think of nothing more appropriate than Ralph Vaughan Williams' "A Sea Symphony," a vast and magnificent choral work to texts by Walt Whitman.

Both the music and the poetry celebrate the transcendent human spirit in ways that strike me as very much akin to Wilkins' own understanding of life and art. This may not be the deepest music of the 20th century, but it does stand among the most exhilarating, stirring and downright beautiful.

What a way to go!



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