SA Symphony's new music director
Lang-Lessing seeks a sound, connects with local tradition
February 22, 2010What can we expect from Sebastian Lang-Lessing when he becomes music director of the San Antonio Symphony next season? The augurs are highly favorable.
The 44-year-old German-born conductor comes to San Antonio with a reputation as an orchestra builder who raised the statures of the symphony orchestra and opera company of Nancy, France, and later of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra in Australia. He also has a major international career in the opera house: The week before coming to San Antonio for the announcement of his appointment, he was conducting a new production of Wagner’s “Rienzi” for Deutsche Oper Berlin, where he had served as resident conductor years earlier.
More important is the evidence of the ears: The San Antonio Symphony sounded terrific under Lang-Lessing in his two try-outs last year. He combined high interpretive intelligence and technical craft with visceral excitement.
When the symphony board decided, for patently silly reasons, not to renew the contract of the highly esteemed Larry Rachleff, some in the orchestra and the audience (present company included) feared that the symphony could not attract a worthy successor. But early indications are that Lang-Lessing is a top-drawer talent.
Shortly after his appointment was announced, Lang-Lessing met with me to talk about his goals for the orchestra and its repertoire. Joining us in the symphony’s new office space in the IBC Center was Jack Fishman, now in his second season as the symphony’s president and CEO.
Lang-Lessing is particularly interested in the quality of sound -- the sounds the orchestra produces and the sound the hall transmits to the audience.
Asked his goals for the orchestra, he answers:
“First of all, find a sound. Certain things are played a certain way. You don’t get away with an ugly -- with something that has no depth of sound. Everything has to have a certain quality to it, which at the moment I don’t get without asking for it. At the end of the day I want to get it without asking for it, and I want it to be there even if I’m not there.”
Lang-Lessing will have ample opportunity to hone the orchestra’s sound. His four-year contract takes him through the 2013-14 season, and he will conduct more weeks each season than is typical for music directors at other major orchestras -- eight classical pairs plus two special concerts during the 2010-11 season, which also is his last with the Tasmanian orchestra, and 10 classical pairs plus two specials in subsequent seasons.
If all goes as planned, the final season of Lang-Lessing’s initial contract will also be the orchestra’s first season in the proposed Bexar County Performing Arts Center. The new space, to be inserted into the Municipal Auditorium, is to be a multipurpose theater but designed primarily for concert acoustics.
Fishman said he had been working closely with the new hall’s design team, and Lang-Lessing will now be involved as well.
“I’m looking for a warm sound,” Lang-Lessing said of his acoustical goals. He cited the Vienna Philharmonic Hall as the best in the world. “Copy it and you’ll be fine.”
According the Fishman, the new hall will be a classic shoebox in plan, like the best single-purpose concert halls, including the Vienna Philharmonic Hall. The acoustical consultant is Akustiks of South Norwalk, Conn.
Even if the final result falls short of Viennese perfection, the new hall could hardly fail to be a big improvement on the orchestra’s current home, the Majestic Theater. That former movie palace is dry, lacking the enveloping resonance of the best concert halls, and the orchestra sounds a bit distant from the audience.
But Lang-Lessing, the orchestra builder, does not regret having to play in the Majestic for the next few years.
“Not having a lush acoustic in the beginning years is actually very healthy. Now in the Majestic, you don’t get anything for free. The sound you’re making is what you get. If you don’t play beautifully, it won’t sound beautifully.”
He said there are ways for the orchestra, especially the strings, to compensate somewhat for the Majestic’s anemic resonance. He favors tighter seating for the orchestra, and he wants new risers, with hard reflective surfaces, for the cellos and doble-basses.
“We should not talk only about the new hall but should also make the next three seasons exciting,” Lang-Lessing said. “Also visually, the lighting is not ideal, and the audience doesn’t feel connected to the stage.”
Before we went into a conference room for the interview, we paused in front of a portrait of the orchestra’s founding music director, Max Reiter. I mentioned that Reiter had been a good friend of Richard Strauss and had programmed the American premiere of the composer’s Four Last Songs, with soprano Kirsten Flagstad -- a bit of history that left Lang-Lessing visibly flabbergasted. (Inexplicably, Flagstad sang only three of the songs during the Nov. 25, 1950, concert. Reiter died of a heart attack a few weeks later.)
It turns out that Lang-Lessing, too, is a Strauss partisan. He will close his first season here with “Also sprach Zarathustra," and a good deal more Strauss is on his agenda. “Metamorphosen” for 23 solo strings, a deeply affecting elegy for the destruction of German culture during World War II, “is something that I am going to program very soon.” The epic tone poem “Ein Heldenleben” is “for sure.” The Symphonic Fantasy on “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” is “something I think is really exciting.” (Reiter and the San Antonio Symphony gave the American premiere in 1948.)
“In an ideal world, if we have the money, we do a concert version of ‘Arabella.’ Or ‘Salome’ or ‘Elektra.’ I think the orchestra is ready for that, and I think it’s important.”
Beyond Strauss, Lang-Lessing hopes to fill numerous gaps in the orchestra’s repertoire. He studied the orchestra’s concert programs for the past 20 years, and his programming for next season begins to fill some of the gaps he found -- the major Mozart symphonies, Dvorak’s “New World,” the music of Mendelssohn and, especially, of Franz Liszt.
“That is a composer who got for various reasons in the shadow and out of the repertoire. Nothing has been played by Liszt here, basically nothing at all, and it’s so important to prepare Mahler, Strauss and Wagner. Liszt invented the Tristan chord. The Tristan chord comes out of Tasso. He’s so important, and such a wonderful composer and so radical.”
Lang-Lessing’s first season also includes a concentrated Tchaikovsky cycle -- all six symphonies and both piano concertos, divvied among four programs on two consecutive weekends. Similar festivals exploring other composers are likely for subsequent seasons. The orchestra will start rehearsals a week early, but even so, Lang-Lessing acknowledges, “It’s a huge challenge. But as music director I think you have to push the limits. It’s always a shock at first [for the orchestra], but then when you get through with this you reach a level of efficiency, of confidence.”
Tchaikovsky is reliable box office, but Lang-Lessing also hopes to lead the audience into less-popular but musically essential territory -- the symphonies of Anton Bruckner, for example, and the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg and Webern).
Of the latter, Lang-Lessing says, “If you don’t play this music, nobody understands contemporary music. You have to play it to make contemporary music work.”
The symphony has dipped its toes into the groundbreaking Viennese. Rachleff led Schoenberg’s 12-tone “Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene” in 2006, and Webern’s Passacaglia, a transitional piece between late Romanticism and tonal freedom, is scheduled for March 26 and 7 under guest conductor Julian Kuerti. Bruckner’s monumental symphonies, though fully part of the 19th century Romantic tradition, have been more elusive on the symphony’s programs -- the most recent was Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, under guest conductor Christoph Perick, 10 years ago. Bruckner is among those composers considered to be box-office poison. Lang-Lessing challenges that assumption.
“We are accusing an audience of not liking Bruckner,” Lang-Lessing said. “How can they like it if they haven’t heard it. We underestimate the curiosity of our audience.
“You have to train your audience for that. They need to get trust that anything we offer, at the end of the day, whatever we program, the people will come because they love the symphony and it won’t be boring.”
Among contemporary composers who might be programmed here, he mentions Finland’s Kaija Saariaho, Germany’s Detlev Glanert, Australia’s Brett Dean, whose violin concerto titled “The Lost Art of Letter Writing” won the 2009 Grawemeyer Award, music’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, and Mexico’s Daniel Catán -- though Lang-Lessing acknowledges he needs to learn more about Latin American composers beyond the few very familiar ones.
He also likes John Corigliano -- another composer with a close San Antonio association: His father served as the orchestra’s concertmaster after he retired from the same post with the New York Philharmonic, and the San Antonio Symphony under Victor Alessandro gave the world premiere of the younger Corigliano’s Piano Concerto, with pianist Hilde Somer. The same forces recorded the concerto, along with Strauss’s Parergon, for Mercury -- a bit of history that also surprises Lang-Lessing.
His new orchestra, he observes, was “much more adventurous in former days. I hope we can re-establish that.”
Mike
Greenberg
