The reign in Spain, part 2: Reviews of the St. Louis Symphony's Spanish tour

David Robertson

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If you follow the peregrinations of our St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, you are no doubt aware that they have just completed a tour of Spain, playing gigs in Valencia, Madrid, and Oviedo.

Reviews have been hard to find. My wife, who can read and speak Spanish and is also more canny about Google searches than I am, has only managed to turn up two so far. I included a link to the first one—a largely negative review of the orchestra's first Spanish tour concert in Valencia on February 8th—in a previous blog post.

Since then, a review has surfaced of the orchestra's performance in Oviedo (the last stop on their tour) of the same program presented at their first stop in Valencia. It's the America-themed evening featuring music by John Adams, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Dvorak. I liked it a lot when I heard it here in January and it appears Aurelio M. Seco, writing for the classical music web site codalario.com, agrees.

You can read the full review at the codalario web site but the bottom line is that Mr. Seco's view is very positive and strikingly similar to my own in many ways.

He praises Maestro Robertson for his "remarkable talent on the stage and his evident communicative gift" and violin soloist Gil Shaham for his "beautiful, clear sound."  He also comments on the close communication between Mr. Shaham and Mr. Robertson, something I noted in my own review.

His view of the music itself is a bit more mixed. He finds John Adams's The Chairman Dances, Foxtrot for Orchestra interesting but a bit too repetitious to sustain interest and repeats some of the usual criticisms of the structural weaknesses of Dvorak's "New World" symphony. He's very taken with Korngold's Violin Concerto, though, because of its "attractive aesthetic, cinematographic nature, and rich expressive moments."

In any case, he had great things to say about the St. Louis Symphony's playing and Mr. Robertson's conducting, which is a nice change from the Valencia review. And, unlike the Valencia critic, he didn't feel compelled to make snarky comments about Mr. Robertson's Spanish pronunciation.

We will continue to look for reviews and I'll post them here as they turn up.

The reign in Spain, part 1: Reviews of the St. Louis Symphony's Spanish tour

Violinist Gil Shaham

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If you follow the peregrinations of our St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, you are no doubt aware that they have just completed a tour of Spain, playing gigs in Valencia, Madrid, and Oviedo.

Wondering how the band was received by the local critics, I asked my wife (who can actually read and speak Spanish) to do some Spanish-language Googling for me. So far the only thing that has surfaced is a critique of their February 8th appearance in Valencia by Justo Romero, the senior critic at Levante-EMV in Valencia and originally published there. It's not available at the Levante-EMV web site for some reason but was retrieved from beckmesser.com, which appears to be an arts aggregator of some sort.

Anyway, Sherry says he pretty much disliked everything and everyone except for Gil Shaham. As far as I can tell from the clunky Google Translate English version, he singles out nearly every section of the orchestra for some sort of criticism and hates both Maestro Robertson's podium style and his artistic decisions.

As my own review of this same program clearly indicates, I don't agree.

As this was the orchestra's first concert after their transatlantic flight, it's possible they weren't in peak form (I am certainly not in peak form after one of those), and I will admit that some of his comments single out issues that I have brought up as well in the past. But it feels to me like the reviewer is making mountains out of molehills to some extent. When a critic goes out of his way to make snarky comments about the conductor's Spanish pronunciation, one is perhaps justified in raising an eyebrow. I know that if a foreign conductor said "thank you" in heavily accented English, I wouldn't regard the quality of his or her accent as worthy of mention in my review.

Anyway, Sherry and I will continue to look for reviews and I'll post them here as they turn up.