In the 1990s, I lived in the Houston area and found it to be one of the most vibrant arts communities in the country: Christoph Eschenbach had revitalized the Houston Symphony; the Houston Grand Opera featured the likes of Renée Fleming in Der Rosenkavalier and Arabella and Hildegard Behrens in Elektra; the Alley Theatre regularly presented new work by Albee, Tennessee Williams, Alan Ayckbourn, and Horton Foote, and even imported the likes of Vanessa and Corin Redgrave for several memorable Shakespeare productions; Rice University featured a student orchestra trained by Larry Rachleff that could match most professional orchestras; the Houston Friends of Chamber Music (now known as Chamber Music Houston) offered world-class concerts year in and year out; numerous museums around town housed solid collections and hosted excellent travelling shows; and the Arts District had a movie theatre (the Angelika) featuring important foreign and independent films, with a café offering gourmet meals.
Today, more than 20 years later, the Angelika is gone, but Houston continues to thrive as a major center for the arts. Significantly, through floods and economic downturns, it has been able, and continues to maintain what it has and expand when the opportunity presents itself.
On a recent weekend visit, I attended a Houston Symphony concert led by its charismatic young music director Andrés Orozco-Estrada, took in a rollicking comedy at the newly-renovated Alley Theatre, and spent an enlightening and sobering afternoon with photographer Roman Vishniac at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Vishniac courageously documented Jewish life in Eastern Europe before World War II.
The Houston Symphony has had a distinguished history, with music directors of the stature of Fricsay, Barbirolli, Stokowski and Previn, and the afore-mentioned Eschenbach. Several years ago, the board made a remarkably wise and ground-breaking decision; instead of bringing in another big name conductor, it hired a talented young ‘rising star’ from Colombia. Andrés Orozco-Estrada had been highly-praised in Europe but was virtually unknown in the U.S when hired by the HSO. The orchestra’s search committee clearly determined that not only did Orozco-Estrada have a bright future as a conductor, but also that as the Hispanic population grew in Texas, so too would the orchestra’s Hispanic audience, making Orozco-Estrada “the right man in the right place” as conductor of the Houston Symphony. In Orozco-Estrada, the orchestra has a dynamic young leader who can reach out to that emerging audience.
Although it is too early to tell whether this strategy has been successful, there is no doubt that Orozco-Estrada is a breath of fresh air to both musicians and audience. Energetic and enthusiastic, he is also a solid musician. He and the orchestra are working their way through the symphonies of Charles Ives at the rate of one per season. In this program of Brahms and Ives (Symphony No. 2), the Houston Symphony sounded rich and full, especially in the strings.
Ives worked on his Symphony N. 2 through the first decade of the Twentieth Century, and added some final touches around 1950, but the piece was not heard in public until Leonard Bernstein led a performance in 1951. The scoring, in its incorporation of American popular songs and hymns of the period within the traditional confines of a classical symphonic structure, is typical Ives The composer was way ahead of his time in creating this kind of ‘Americana’ and it proved baffling – even shocking – to some listeners. Judging by its reaction, the Houston audience ‘got it’ and enjoyed the piece immensely. While Orozco-Estrada’s lively and informative introduction from the podium certainly helped, it was mainly the sheer joy of the performance that elicited such a positive response.
The second half of the concert featured Emanuel Ax in Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2. Ax has long been an exemplary Brahmsian, and this performance represented a lifetime of living with this composer’s music. In the 1980s, Emanuel Ax made superb recordings of Brahms’ solo piano music and chamber music with Isaac Stern and Yo-Yo Ma. Today, at age 66, he has lost none of his technical mastery of this very difficult music.
Some “traditionalist” interpreters of his music believe that the essence of Brahms is gravitas – meaning slow tempo, deadly serious mood throughout and no smiling allowed. Emanuel Ax takes a different view. The opening bars of the Second Piano Concerto – a duet between horn and piano – are often taken so slowly that it is difficult to discern any tempo at all. Ax notes that this section is marked Allegro con brio and that these bars are not introductory, but rather, the beginning of the exposition. What Brahms had in mind becomes obvious when one looks at the recapitulation, which must be played ‘in tempo’. Similarly, the slow movement, which is marked Andante (moderately slow) not Adagio (slow), can still be played espressivo, as marked, if played ‘in tempo’, whereas it practically falls apart if the tempo is too slow.
Although he has performed this work dozens of times and was authoritative in this performance, Ax was clearly enjoying every note of it, as if hearing it for the first time. When he was not attending to his own part, he spent every moment listening attentively to the orchestra.
At the end of the performance, the audience called Emanuel Ax back to the stage several times, eventually persuading him to play an encore. It was then that he did something very unusual; he invited principal cellist Brinton Averil Smith to join him in a piece by Fauré, a transcription of the song Après un rêve. Smith had played the solo part in the slow movement of the concerto magnificently and had also been outstanding in several solo passages in the Ives Symphony No. 2 earlier in the evening. This unusual ‘encore’, a wonderfully generous gesture on the part of a great soloist, was much appreciated by the audience – a grand way to end an exceptionally fine concert.
Frank Huang, who has been concertmaster of the Houston Symphony for many years, was recently invited to become concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. The Houston Symphony is now conducting a search for a successor to Mr. Huang and as part of the process has been trying out guest concertmasters. For this concert, Jing Wang, concertmaster of the Hong Kong Philharmonic, sat in the concertmaster’s chair, and made an excellent impression. The 30-year-old Mr. Wang, who was born in China, grew up in Canada. Before taking up his position in Hong Kong, he was concertmaster of the Dallas Opera.
The Alley Theatre opened its building in Houston’s Arts District in 1968. In this building, the company has presented 47 seasons of theatrical excellence. Recently, it became apparent that the building was in need of major renovations. At a cost of $46.5 million, improvements were made to the washrooms, the lobby and the performing space. The theatre now has a large thrust stage and state-of-the-art equipment. The audience has the benefit of new seats and better acoustics.
The first production in the newly-renovated building was Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors based on Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters. As directed by Gregory Boyd, this was a hilariously entertaining ‘romp’. The fine cast, headed by Jeffrey Bean as Francis Henshall, accomplished the outrageous physical comedy and endless double takes with aplomb. Behind all the crotch-grabbing and pratfalls, it was apparent that the show had been rehearsed meticulously for spot-on timing.
Adding immeasurably to the fun was the presence of The Craze, a four-piece band on stage throughout the show. The setting of the play was Brighton, England, 1963 and The Craze captured the spirit of the times, playing music by Grant Olding. It was corny and delightful at the same time, and as did the actors, the four musicians combined indomitable energy with impeccable timing. The Alley Theatre’s 2015-2016 season is off to a great start in a refurbished facility that is both actor and audience-friendly.
Just a few miles to the southwest, bordering Rice University, one finds Houston’s Museum District. There is so much to see here – there are a half-dozen museums within walking distance of each other – that a weekend visit is not nearly enough to do it justice. On this occasion, we visited the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Houston for the Roman Vishniac Rediscovered exhibition.
Vishniac (1897-1990), who was born in Moscow, grew up in Berlin in the 1920s and 30s. It was his mission in life to record everyday life in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, and his iconic images capture, among other things, the misery of life in the shtetls as anti-Semitism gradually destroyed Jewish communities throughout Europe. It is a harrowing experience to walk through the galleries of this exhibition, seeing with one’s own eyes the hopelessness of life under these conditions.
Photographing the plight of the Jews and the Nazi presence was strictly forbidden in Nazi-occupied countries, but Vishniac persevered. Arrested and put in a concentration camp, he managed to escape and made his way to the United States (1941), where he went on to have a distinguished career as a photographer. Among his most important photographs from this period are portraits of Albert Einstein and Marc Chagall.
The Vishniac exhibition at the MFA also includes some talks and concerts. A highlight of our visit was an hour spent with Rabbi Dan Gordon as he told stories and folktales from the old Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, a touching and often inspiring complement to the often troubling images that surrounded us in the galleries.
#LUDWIGVAN
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