STRING THEORY
Santa Fe Symphony with guest conductor Andrés Cárdenes Lensic Performing Arts Center, March 18 Andrés Cárdenes, who appeared as guest conductor and violin soloist with the Santa Fe Symphony at the Lensic Performing Arts Center last Sunday, served for two decades as concertmaster of the Pittsburgh Symphony. He was appointed in 1989 by that ensemble’s newly installed music director, Lorin Maazel, himself a violinist of no mean ability, and it’s easy to hear why a string-inclined conductor would leap at the opportunity to have such a musician as his principal interface to the heart of his orchestra.
Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 2 was written in 1775 by a remarkable nineteen-year-old honing in on greatness. Cárdenes, leading the orchestra from his soloist’s spot, offered a precise interpretation of impeccable musical attributes. The program did not identify the instrument he was playing; it may well have been the 1719 Pietro Guarneri violin he has used in the past. He drew from it a sound that was consistently sweet, silvery, and on the small side. His approach tended everywhere toward the lyrical, although he did invest the solo part with clear articulation and phrasing — incisiveness that did not always carry over to the more generalized playing of the orchestral musicians. The tempo seemed a shade slow in the first movement, exacerbated by the orchestra’s dragging in repeated notes in the accompaniment. This was an old-fashioned interpretation that could have been delivered 50 or 60 years ago, before the advances of the historically informed performance movement showed how a more rhetorical approach and stronger rhythmic definition can bring greater point to music that threatens to meander in prettiness. In the end, Cárdenes’ work was most notable for its exemplary violinistic purity.
He was an efficient, easy-to-follow conductor with middle-of-the-road sensibilities. Rossini’s L’italiana in Algeri overture received a lissome workout in which the most notable news was the playing of Joshua Sechan, who is filling in as principal bassoonist for the current season. His playing combined technical finesse with musical charm and wit. In fact, this was a dream program for a bassoonist, since it concluded with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4. The last movement of that piece includes what musicians sometimes dub a “great bassoon joke.” At the recapitulation — the point where all ears expect the full orchestra to resoundingly revisit the movement’s rapid-fire principal theme — Beethoven instead withdraws his forces and has the bassoon scurry off with the tune all on its own. The solo line is marked dolce (sweetly), which Sechan miraculously achieved. The accompaniment is limited to pizzicato strings, and one wished Cárdenes had held them closer to the
piano dynamic that Beethoven wisely indicates. Other admirable contributions from principals came from flutist Jesse Tatum, clarinetist Lori Lovato, and hornist Nathan Ukens. The symphony got a solid workout on the whole, even if Cárdenes did not offer distinctive interpretative insights. The Fourth Symphony is full of notes, but greater attention to the spaces between them — to silence and separation — could have made them more characterful.
Also on the program was Sueños de Sefarad, by the late Pittsburgh composer David Stock. A 10-minute expansion for string orchestra of a piece originally for string quartet, it is a suite of Sephardic traditional songs rich in Ibero-Judaic flavoring. Effective touches of orchestration included placing the opening tune in the violas and doubling the line in much higher violin harmonics, yielding an effect that was simultaneously rich and ghostly. — James M. Keller