Mozart: Così fan tutte: Overture K. 588
Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major K. 503
Schubert: Symphony No. 9 in C major D. 944 “Great”
Kiyoshi Tamagawa, piano
Austin Symphony Orchestra/Peter Bay, conductor
Long Center for the Performing Arts
Austin, Texas
Saturday, November 22, 2014
Austin, Texas has become widely known as the “Live Music Capital of the World.” This may well be true when you consider that 3,000 bands come to Austin every March as part of South by Southwest (SXSW); that Austin City Limits is a long-running and very popular public television series; and that the bars along Sixth Street in downtown Austin are hopping every night to the sound of country and rock bands. The city even boasts a statue of Austin country music icon, Willie Nelson.
Austin, however, can also boast of having of having the oldest orchestra in the state: the Austin Symphony (ASO), founded in 1911. The ASO doesn’t draw the crowds that flock to SXSW, nor does it perform on the level of the Dallas or Houston symphonies, but it is a solid professional orchestra with an excellent music director, Peter Bay. Maestro Bay has held the position for 17 years.
Austin is the capital of the state of Texas and one of the fastest-growing communities in the country. Austin itself has nearly a million inhabitants and the greater Austin area (GAA), including Round Rock, is double that.
A high-tech dynamo, Austin is home to numerous Fortune 500 companies, and the headquarters of Whole Foods and the University of Texas, which has a student body of 50,000 plus. At last count, 35% of Austin’s population was Hispanic. And Austin’s politics? Texas is known to be a “red” or Republican state but Austin always votes overwhelmingly Democratic in Presidential elections. In 2012, the count was 60% Democratic and 36% Republican.
Financially, the Austin Symphony runs a very tight ship. In 10 years of residency in Austin during the winter months, I have never heard any talk of deficits, strikes or lockouts. Under the firm hand of long-time board chairman Joseph R. Long – the Long Center, the orchestra’s home, is named after him and his wife Teresa – fiscal responsibility comes first, and artistic innovation would be well down the list. At a time when orchestras everywhere are floundering, Mr. Long’s conservatism is not only admirable; it is probably necessary for survival.
But make no mistake about it, without Mr. Long and others like him, there would be no Austin Symphony at all. These folks have made a firm and expensive commitment to have a professional orchestra in their community. In Peter Bay they found a conductor willing and able to carry out that mission. If Maestro Bay doesn’t get to do everything he might like to do, he has nonetheless managed to do quite a lot: he has programmed major works by Nielsen, Syzmanowski, Takemitsu and Randall Thomson, and Cary Ratcliff’s oratorio “Ode to Common Things,” as well as symphonies by Bruckner and Mahler and centennial concerts for both Copland (2000) and Barber (2010); and last season, he led the premieres of a number of works by American composer Edward Burlingame Hill (1872-1960). The performances were recorded for release on the Bridge label in the next few months.
In last week’s NY Times, there was an article about the “shrinking” American orchestras. A number of orchestras have indeed cut their costs by reducing the number of players under contract. The Atlanta Symphony recently reduced its numbers to 77 from a high of 95, thereby saving millions of dollars. This attrition will not occur in Austin, however, because the orchestra hires players on a per service basis. Whereas the Philadelphia Orchestra offers its players 52-week contracts or close to it, whether they play or not, the Austin Symphony pays its players only for the services (rehearsals and concerts) for which they are actually needed; for example, for this week’s ASO Mozart-Schubert concert, only about 68 players were required. Had the Philadelphia Orchestra played this concert, all 95 or so players under full-time contract would have been paid, even though 27 of them were not needed and would not have performed.
Orchestral players, of course, would prefer to be under full-time contract knowing that they had a pay check coming in every week, whether or not they were performing. But orchestra boards and management know all too well that in most communities full-time contracts are a recipe for bankruptcy. Most orchestras in the United States and Canada couldn’t possibly keep their players busy for 52 weeks a year and so would be better off utilizing the ASO model.
The Austin Symphony plays 8 pairs of classical concerts each season. In addition, there are 4 pairs of Pops concerts and a small number of single performances, including an annual Messiah. The ASO gives a number of children’s concerts as well and hires itself out as the “pit band” for Ballet Austin – mostly Nutcrackers – and for three productions by Austin Opera.
This season (2014-2015), the programming for the 8 pairs of classical concerts is conservative even by Austin Symphony standards – not much contemporary music and not much unusual repertoire. The ASO usually brings in a fair number of big-name soloists each season – Joshua Bell, Andre Watts, and Itzhak Perlman have appeared in recent seasons – but the headliners for this season are not on that level. The best-known would probably be trumpeter Alison Balsom.
This week’s concert featured Kiyoshi Tamagawa, a Professor of Music at Southwestern University in nearby Georgetown. Perhaps his engagement had something to do with local musical “networking.” It would be difficult to imagine a more faceless performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C major K. 503: tempos were slow – dirgelike in the second movement; dynamics seemed firmly locked in mezzo forte; and whatever grandeur and humour the composer intended, seemed of no interest to this performer.
After intermission, Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 in C major was like a breath of fresh air. The orchestra dug into the score with energy and enthusiasm. Early in the slow introduction, cellos and violas sang out with beautiful tone and well-shaped phrasing.
Peter Bay’s approach to the piece was in the Toscanini-Szell tradition: tempi were on the quick side – generally straight ahead – and not much time was spent smelling the roses or exploring the poetic potential of Schubert’s melodies. To my way of thinking (I have long admired the 1951 Furtwängler recording), this approach is a mistake. This symphony is notoriously long and much of the length has to do with repetition. Literal repetition soon becomes tiresome. A case in point is the ending of the first movement. Playing it in tempo as he did, Peter Bay missed a golden opportunity to cap off this long movement with a truly majestic statement of the main theme, an effect which can only be achieved by broadening the tempo.
To me, much of the most haunting music in the symphony comes in the Trio of the third movement. There is a lot of repetition here too, but by carefully balancing the orchestra, shaping the phrases, and above all by taking time to let the wind soloists fully express the beauty of the music, the conductor can seduce listeners into a desire for this music never to end.
Maestro Bay has his own view of the Schubert Ninth and whether one agrees with it or not, he expressed it with conviction and authority.
And the poutine – that gourmet delight from Quebec? It turns out that there are a least five restaurants in Austin offering poutine, with one of them standing head and shoulders above the others (www.escoffier.edu/blog/i-love-poutine-celebrating-french-canadian-cuisine). As one might expect, some of them are Tex-Mex versions with BBQ sauce and/or jalapenos mixed in with the cheese curds and the French fries.
Paul E. Robinson
- SCRUTINY | TSO Lets Berlioz Do The Talking In Season Opener - September 21, 2018
- RECORD KEEPING | Even Yannick Nézet-Séguin Can’t Make Us Love Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito - September 6, 2018
- RECORD KEEPING | Giovanna d’Arco With Anna Netrebko Explains Why The Best Operas Survive - August 30, 2018
