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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > May > 03 > Entry
Revew: UT Symphony Orchestra
Whoever had the idea of raising the pit in Bass Concert Hall and putting the entire University of Texas Symphony Orchestra on the apron out in front of the proscenium deserves a Wall Street-style bonus. This seating plan transformed Saturday night’s special concert honoring School of Music patron Sarah and Ernest Butler from another concert in Bass (renovated or not) into the best-sounding live performance by a symphony orchestra that these ears can remember.
The stage of Bates Recital Hall (the UT Symphony’s usual hangout) and the hall as a whole are too small to hold a large instrumental ensemble happily. Saturday night in Bass, the players had the physical room and their instruments had the acoustical room to speak properly. Every note (and every mistake) could not have been clearer, but the marvelous blend that conductor Gerhardt Zimmermann has built with his orchestra was audible in a dramatically new way. I heard the kind of presence and detail combined with an expansive, nicely reverberant room sound that I thought only those fancy Dutch recording engineers get using about 80 microphones.
But a great hall or a great setup don’t make a dumb performance into a great one. What we heard in Bass Saturday evening, quite precisely, was what wonderful work Zimmermann has been doing at UT, where before we only sort of got the idea.
Neither piece on the program — the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with student soloist Soo Jin Nam and the Beethoven Symphony no. 9 with a solo quartet of young professionals and the massed UT choruses (excellently trained by John Len Wiles)—was note-perfect. And I could quibble about some of Zimmermann’s interpretive choices (Beethoven wrote only F’s for the timpani in the second movement; don’t add stuff at the end). But Zimmermann’s interpretation made sense, it honored the piece that Beethoven wrote and he made the whole performance totally persuasive.
This is not the first time that a conductor who is an artist and a seasoned professional has led a talented and enthusiastic student orchestra (with an expanse of rehearsal time thrown in that most professional orchestras would kill for) and produced thrilling results. But those results happened in Bass Concert Hall on Saturday in a big way.
One more thing. I generally don’t like talking from the stage at music concerts; but Zimmermann’s spoken introduction to the Beethoven, witty and revelatory, was as valuable as the performance that followed it.
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