SA Symphony, conductor Christian Knapp
Lynn Harrell serves Edard Elgar's Cello Concerto at peak of
ripeness
February 14, 2009Cellist Lynn Harrell made a return visit to the San Antonio Symphony on Feb. 13 after an absence of many years. His vehicle this time was Edward Elgar’s Concerto in E Minor of 1919, and in it Harrell revealed the Romantic sensibility at the peak of ripeness -- that is, still crisp and tart.
The guest conductor was a young American, Christian Knapp, who opened with Beethoven’s “Leonore” Overture No. 3 and closed with Igor Stravinsky’s 1947 revised version of the “Petrushka” ballet score.
Much of Elgar’s richly melodic concerto is brooding and melancholy. Harrell, declining to overstate the Angst, let the music speak for itself through honest means -- impeccable timing, incisive rhythms, a way of husbanding resources so that big gestures produced big effects. There was plenty of tender feeling in his beautifully phrased account of the slow movement, but he didn’t overplay the sentiment. His double-stops were meaty, his tone perhaps a bit less generous than that from some other instruments, but very nicely balanced.
Harrell offered an encore, an arrangement of Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat, Op. 9, No. 2, in honor of his former students -- he teaches at Rice University’s Shepherd school of Music -- who now play with this orchestra.
(Many years ago, in a recital with pianist James Levine at the Ravinia Festival north of Chicago, the encore was a bit grander. After playing a full program, Harrell and Levine responded to the ovation by returning to the stage with three other musicians in tow -- violinist Robert Mann of the Juilliard Quartet and bassist Joseph Guastafeste of the Chicago Symphony are the two I remember -- to play Schubert’s complete “Trout “ Quintet.” Now that was an encore.)
Knapp conducted Elgar stylishly, with a good sense of the breadth and mass of this music. In Beethoven and Stravinsky, however, Knapp showed more enthusiasm than craft. He started off very nicely, getting a lovely sheen from the strings in the Beethoven’s slow introduction, which the conductor shaped lovingly. But much that followed, in both Beethoven and Stravinsky, was out of focus. Ensemble was often imprecise, attacks were fuzzy. Knapp rendered the climactic moments with plenty of excitement, but the lines leading to those climaxes tended to be choppy. Insufficient care with balances and dynamics left even Stravinsky’s vividly colored score sometimes sounding monochromatic. From my seat in the mezzanine, it appeared that Knapp spent too much time with his head bent down toward score and too little time communicating with the orchestra. I am obliged to report, however, that a musician, whose views I respect, liked Knapp’s work quite a lot.
As usual, there wee many fine individual performances from the principals, especially from bassoonist Sharon Kuster in “Petrushka.”
Mike
Greenberg
