Symphony lifts community spirits

Music director Andrés Orozco-Estrada had originally planned to open the Houston Symphony’s 2017-18 season with an all-Schumann set of music. That was before Hurricane Harvey hit, displacing the symphony from its Jones Hall performance home and plaguing the city with a hangover that will linger for some time.

So in the wake of Harvey, Orozco-Estrada tabled the Schumann in favor of three works unified by exuberant and compelling dance rhythms to lift Houston’s spirits. It worked. A demonstrative and supportive audience rewarded the musicians with standing ovations and vocal encouragement throughout the evening this past Saturday, the second of the Symphony’s concerts in Rice University’s Stude Concert Hall.

It probably helped that the concerts were free, as no more than a scant few

seats were left empty for this subscription-series concert.

Approximately half the capacity of Jones Hall (the Symphony doesn’t open the balcony in its home theater), the 1,000-seat Stude Concert Hall offered an intimate, immersive experience with the orchestra, aided by a balanced acoustic presence that Jones Hall doesn’t quite measure up to — despite the work of multiple acousticians over the years. With seating surrounding the stage on all sides of the Stude’s mahogany-trimmed auditorium, there’s no doubt that the audience is in the same space as the musicians. This means that the orchestra had to scale back its sound so as not to overwhelm the space. It had no trouble doing so.

Orozco-Estrada led the orchestra in an incisive but relaxed performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Capriccio Espagnol” that allowed the liltingly dramatic dance rhythms room to breathe. This was an engaging performance that felt propulsive, but not rushed.

Astor Piazzolla’s slinky, jazz-infused homage to Vivaldi, “Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas (Four Seasons of Buenos Aires)” filled out the first half of the program. The give and take of Piazzolla’s tango rhythms seemed to inspire violin soloist Leticia Moreno to strike tangolike attitudes during her

performance. Moreno and the orchestra were locked in a musical tango hold, Moreno’s lyrical, duskytoned solos punctuated by the sonic equivalent of the Argentine dance’s lightning-quick leg flicks.

Orozco-Estrada, who playfully challenged the

audience to guess the order of the four seasons (hint: it’s not the same as Vivaldi’s order, since Buenos Aires is in the Southern Hemisphere) had a podium presence that was even more animated than usual in Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. Always expressive, without threatening to turn his concerts into podium shows, the youthful maestro’s ebullience fueled an energetic reading of the Beethoven symphony.

Orozco-Estrada and the orchestra were aided and abetted by the hall’s acoustics, which favor the higher, brighter instruments in the orchestra — though the warm, enveloping sound of the low brass and strings were in full evidence. The horns gleamed like sunlight through the orchestral texture in the first movement to thrilling effect.

A few moments of imperfect precision aside, the ensemble was tight throughout, with a thrilling gallop to the end that brought the audience to its feet.

Kudos to the Houston Symphony administration and Rice University for anticipating its audience’s needs in an unaccustomed environment and tapping into a communal feeling of support to make it all work. Everyone, from the musicians onstage to the friendly Rice parking attendants and Houston Symphony ushers — stationed all along the path leading to the Shepherd School of Music — gave the impression that “we’re all in this together.”

The challenge is to hold on to that feeling and level of engagement long after the Symphony returns to Jones Hall.