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Bion Tsang's performance of the Dvorak Cello Concerto in B minor with conductor Peter Bay and the Austin Symphony Orchestra at the Long Center for the Performing Arts makes the Austin Chronicle list of Top 10 Dance and Classical Music events in Austin last year. Critic Robert Faires characterizes Bion "as Cyrano, swashing and buckling his way through the robust, romantic score."
Classical music cutbacks and powerful performances
The sluggish economic recovery is still taking a toll on musical organizations. The Dallas Symphony Orchestra cut back both classical and pops seasons by a fourth, and the Dallas Opera was down from five productions to three.
Artistically, the DSO continues to reach unprecedented heights under music director Jaap van Zweden, and in March 2013 they’ll make their first European tour together. Both the DSO and the Fort Worth Symphony got high-visibility exposure at the Dallas conference of the League of American Orchestras. The new 750-seat Dallas City Performance Hall, with variable acoustics, provided a welcome new venue for smaller-scale performances, but its rents are too high for many smaller groups.
Wonderful performances included:
1 Meyers-Tsang-Nel Trio, Oct. 20. Pianist Anton Nel and cellist Bion Tsang, both on the music faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, are regular performance partners. They added violinist Anne Akiko Meyers for a program ranging from a virtuoso piano piece by Granados to Britten’s C-major Cello Sonata and the Arensky Piano Trio. Start to finish, this was playing of brilliance and finely felt expression.
2 Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, van Zweden.Britten: War Requiem, Nov. 8. Practically any concert led by Jaap van Zweden, now in his fifth season as DSO music director, would be worth top 10 inclusion. But his command of form, structure and detail, and his visceral way of making music, yielded a particularly electrifying performance of one of the greatest chorus-and-orchestra works of all time.
3 Dallas Opera: Tristan und Isolde, Feb. 16. Only a late fundraising campaign brought this imaginative production — direction by Christian Räth, projections by Elaine McCarthy — to pass. It was one of the company’s greatest triumphs of the 21st century, with powerful portrayals of Wagner’s doomed lovers by Clifton Forbis and Jean-Michèle Charbonnet and eloquent playing by the orchestra, under music director Graeme Jenkins.
4 Chanticleer, Oct. 28. This was a good year for choral music, but the best of the best was probably this male vocal ensemble. In a program ranging from renaissance polyphony to the group’s signature spiritual arrangements, this was singing of astonishing élan and elegance, all the more glorious in the spacious acoustics of the Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
5 Tallis Scholars, March 26. Guadalupe Cathedral was also the setting for this exquisite concert by one of England’s top professional chamber choirs. The music, by the 16th century Englishman William Cornysh and the Frenchman Jean Mouton, was pretty esoteric, but director Peter Phillips and his charges brought its rich counterpoint to glorious life.
6 Alessio Bax, Oct. 2. Although Bax is Italian by birth, Dallas has a certain claim to him thanks to his study with Joaquín Achúcarro at Southern Methodist University, and he was based here for a number of years. New York is now home, but Bax is back frequently to teach and perform, and he gave one of the first classical performances in the new Dallas City Performance Hall. Although stuck with a brassy Kawai piano, he delivered a seasoned and sensitive master’s accounts of Brahms, Rachmaninoff and Ravel.
7 Brentano String Quartet, Nov. 13. That this foursome will be the quartet-in-residence for the upcoming Van Cliburn International Piano Competition is some of the best news in ages. Their finely buffed concert at Bass Performance Hall was a revelation, with genuinely different — and stylistically apt — sounds for music by Purcell, Haydn, Brahms and Bartók.
8 Orpheus Chamber Singers, April 21. Dallas’ excellent professional chamber choir, led by Donald Krehbiel, is a reliable placeholder in the year’s top 10. A program of music from the British Isles, from Thomas Tallis to Herbert Howells and James MacMillan, wanted more reverberation than Spring Valley United Methodist Church could supply. Beautiful music still made its mark in polished and expressive singing.
9 Meadows Symphony Orchestra, April 10. Led by Paul Phillips, Southern Methodist University’s student orchestra continues to amaze. “Had you been led in blindfolded, with no knowledge of who was playing the Mahler Ninth Symphony,” the review read, “you might have assumed some famous orchestra, led by a maestro of uncanny command and sensitivity.”
10 (Tie) Fort Worth Symphony/Rachleff, Oct. 27, and Fort Worth Opera Tosca, May 12. Guest conductor Larry Rachleff’s lovingly detailed concert with the FWSO was a dramatic demonstration of what’s too often lacking from that very able orchestra. The Fort Worth Opera Festival mounted a gripping Tosca, with a powerful trio of Carter Scott (Tosca), Roger Honeywell (Cavaradossi) and Michael Chioldi (Scarpia).
Top CDs
1 Beethoven: Late String Quartets. Cypress String Quartet (Cypress, 3 CDs)
2 Beethoven: Piano Sonatas. Jonathan Biss (Onyx)
3 Brahms: Cello Sonatas, arrangements of Hungarian Dances. Bion Tsang, Anton Nel (Artek)
4 Brahms: Piano Works. Alessio Bax (Signum)
5 Fuchs: Serenades. Cologne Chamber Orchestra, Christian Ludwig (Naxos)
By Scott Cantrell Classical Music Critic scantrell@dallasnews.com
Concert Review
PLANO — Pity the poor musicians who’ll be reviewed in the weeks after Saturday night’s concert. Violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, cellist Bion Tsang and pianist Anton Nel set a standard of technical brilliance and sophisticated expressivity rarely encountered anywhere.
It’s too bad the concert, presented by the Asian American Chamber Music Society at St. Andrew United Methodist Church, wasn’t better publicized. (I learned about it from Nel’s posting on Facebook.) It would have gotten a rave review at Carnegie Hall.
All three musicians have significant concert careers, Meyers’ the highest-profile. Tsang and Nel are both on the music faculty of the University of Texas at Austin.
Singly, in pairs and all together, they made the music seem a living, breathing organism. Tension and release were suavely managed, as were interplays between players. In an age plagued by so much overplaying, nothing was ever forced; nuances of piano and pianissimo ravished the ear.
Nel, the only musician who played every work, opened with a solo piece: Granados’ Allegro de concierto, served up with apparently effortless virtuosity but also generous rubato where called for. Then he and Tsang made a riveting case for Britten’s C major Sonata for cello and piano.
Composed for the late Mstislav Rostropovich, this comprises five movements of amazing invention. In the opening “Dialogo,” two-note motifs eventually spin out scales. Succeeding movements explore pizzicato chatters, high cello keenings over pounding piano chords, hushed arpeggios against piano tinklings, glissandos and a final fury of bow bouncings.
Playing with a tone of silken beauty, Tsang made some very challenging music sound utterly natural; Nel seemed to have limitless reserves of dynamics and color. Both evinced exquisite sensitivity to timing, pivotal notes placed just so.
Meyers and Nel brought out every possible nuance in the Ravel Violin Sonata: mysterious interplays, sultry blues, virtuoso skitterings. Soulful moments in the first movement were breathtakingly beautiful.
Meyers’ tone was so big and brilliant that in the Anton Arensky Piano Trio I feared for balances with Tsang’s subtle and refined sound. But adjustments were made, and it’s hard to imagine a more accomplished or more emotionally generous performance of this classic of high-humidity, heavy-breathing late romanticism.
A richly deserved standing ovation was rewarded with a dreamy Astor Piazzola Oblivion.
Wow. What a concert.
By Scott Cantrell
Concert Preview
I'I'm going to let you all in on one of the best kept secrets of music school students at universities worldwide. It's called the “faculty recital.”
Faculty recitals are awesome for these reasons:
1. They are always either really cheap or free. 2. Faculty members are playing so the quality of performance is top notch. 3. It’s a good way to get to know the chamber music (music for small groups of instruments, string quartets rather than big ensembles like symphonies, or soprano and piano pieces rather than huge casts like operas) repertoire and hear it live. 4. Small venue equals better seats.
If you would like to experience the faculty recital for yourself, this Friday’s chamber music marathon celebrating cellist Bion Tsang’s 10-year anniversary on faculty at The University of Texas at Austin Butler School of Music would be the perfect place to start.
“What attracts me the most about teaching at the Butler School of Music and living in Austin is the incredible support that I get from the community,” said Bion. “It is so clear that the people here love their artists and everything we do.”
The concert features Butler School of Music faculty Patrick Hughes, Kristin Jensen, Anton Nel, Rick Rowley, David Small, Nathan Williams, Sandy Yamamoto, DaXun Zhang and the Miró Quartet as well as guests Mela Dailey, Amy Levine-Tsang and John Novacek. The diverse program will include works by Bach, Boccherini, Mozart, Novacek, Schubert, Vaughan Williams and Villa-Lobos.
It will also be the debut of UT Cellos, the first all-cello ensemble (16 cellos!) at the University of Texas, which will perform works by Villa Lobos under the direction of Austin Symphony's Peter Bay.
When I asked Bion what he had in mind for the future, he said, “This concert celebrates my first 10 years at UT, and I so look forward to the next 10. As for the future, I'm thinking of changing the name to the Longhorn Cellos. Shall we take a poll?”
By Joelle Zigman
Concert Preview
It was Bion Tsang’s debut with the Austin Symphony Orchestra in Dvořák’s Cello Concerto last season that earned him the 2012 Austin Critic’s Table Award for Outstanding Symphonic Performance.
Luke Quinton at the Statesman wrote that his interpretation “kept the crowd on the edge of its seat” and Robert Faires at the Chronicle poetically envisioned Tsang swashing and buckling his way through the work “like a great actor playing Cyrano de Bergerac.”
This Friday, Tsang will be in the spotlight again as he celebrates his first ten years with the Butler School of Music in a special chamber concert at Bates Recital Hall.
“I wanted to kick off my next ten years here by collaborating with as many of my Butler School of Music colleagues as possible,” Tsang writes in an email to ATXclassical. “Chamber music is such a vital component of my performing career outside of Austin. It’s often difficult to coordinate schedules with my BSOM colleagues to perform together on campus. With such happy feelings about teaching and living in Austin, I was determined to make it work.”
It is perhaps a fitting tribute to celebrate ten years of teaching during this year’s National Arts Education Week (Sept. 9-15). Tsang stresses the importance of performing artists teaching a future generation of musicians.
“Performing classical music is an aural craft and physical endeavor that, much like sports, can’t be taught by reading a manual or watching a video,” he writes. “If we performers want keep our art alive, we must continue the tradition of passing down hands-on what we know to the next generation. The great performing musicians that I admired the most growing up—historical figures such as Pablo Casals, Gregor Piatigorsky, Jascha Heifetz and Leonard Bernstein—were also important educators and pedagogues.”
Classical music is alive and well in Austin, and Tsang thinks the strong presence of students and faculty might have something to do with this.
“Maybe I’m biased,” he writes, “but I like to think that the UT Butler School of Music has something to do with the vibrancy of the Austin classical music scene. I feel blessed to be part of such a collection of talent. And we have such generous, proactive contributors within the local community who help the university and BSOM attract and retain such talent in Austin.”
This Friday’s concert features works by Bach, Boccherini, Mozart, Novacek, Schubert, Vaughan Williams and Villa-Lobos. The concert also will be webcast live via the Butler School of Music website.
By Marc van Bree
