The El Paso Museum of Art hosted a zombie walk Saturday evening, with what looked like a couple hundred people, including little kids, parading around as the undead.
I can't help but wonder if some of the musicians in the El Paso Symphony Orchestra, who performed the second of two weekend concerts about an hour after the last zombie limped by the Plaza Theatre, didn't relate a little to those faux fatals.
Now in search of a new conductor, the seventh in their 81-year history, the orchestra is showing new life. The first of six candidates, Sacramento Philharmonic associate conductor Kenneth Raskin, energized the musicians last month with a program that included a Mozart concerto and Mahler's challenging first symphony.
Second candidate David Handel flat out elevated their game, with a little help from the great guitarist Pepe Romero, who played three encores before an appreciative crowd of 1,000 Saturday night (about 1,100 showed up for Friday's concert).
On paper, you can see why the search committee, made up of five board members and five of the musicians, chose the 46-year-old Buffalo native as one of six finalists from a field of nearly 250 applicants.
A two-time Fulbright Senior Scholar recipient, University of Michigan music school grad, apprenticed with Kurt Masur and conducting gigs all over Mexico, Central America and South America. He's spent the last 14 years as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra of Bolivia, where he's grown the budget, audience, ticket sales (while lowering prices), number of concerts and revenue.
He recently was named principal guest conductor of the Russian Philharmonic, part of the Moscow City Orchestra.
And, yes, he speaks Spanish, digs Latin American composers and gets that a largely European concept can adapt to areas that aren't heavily Eurocentric in their thinking.
One well-spoken elderly gentleman suggested to Handel during Saturday's Opening Notes talk that he might be overqualified for the job here. When another asked if he was related to George Handel, the "Messiah" composer, he jokingly answered in the affirmative, then admitted he didn't know.
The articulate nature he showed in that talk in the Philanthropy Theatre, attended by about 50 people, and a post-concert Q&A, which drew about 70, manifested in other, sometimes mesmerizing ways Saturday night.
The program of program, or storytelling, music opened with a little known piece by a little known composer. "Escenas Argentinas" by the Paris-trained 20th century Argentine Carlos Lopez Buchardo is a lush, imagistic piece that combines Argentine folk music and dance rhythms with classical conventions. It was a nice introduction, a gentle piece of music, played with precision and restraint, that nicely set up what was to follow.
This isn't the first time that Spanish classical guitar master Romero has performed late Spanish composer (and friend) Jaoquin Rodrigo's beautiful "Concierto de Aranjuez" with EPSO. He last did it in 2007, when Sarah Ioannides was on the podium. I wasn't around then, but wonder if that performance was as mesmerizing as Saturday's.
"Aranjuez" is a luminous piece of music, one man's celebration of his love for his wife, which blends Spanish folk idioms, particularly flamenco, with rich orchestration. It allows the guitar to shine on its own and in tandem with a smaller, string-heavy configuration of the orchestra. Handel, careful to accompany not upstage, conducted with his hands, not a baton.
As wonderfully romantic as they are, nothing in the first or third movement compares to the familiar (even to those of us who don't routinely follow classical music) second movement, or Adagio, for its straight-to-the-heart sadness, inspired by the miscarriage of the composer's first child and his wife's near death.
Romero, 67, awes with his technical mastery and accuracy without sacrificing any of the rawness of the emotion. If anything, he may have enhanced it. Anyone who's lost a loved one, tragically or not, would be hard pressed not to feel the solitary melancholy in Rodrigo's piece, which Romero tapped with such exacting emotional depth and clarity. It was tears-in-the-eyes kind of stuff.
The crowd seemed to feel that connection. It greeted Romero's performance with a rousing ovation, prompting three encores (one more than Friday), including one written by his father. With his knowing smile and soulful, eyes-closed guitar playing, he made it look easy.
The concert's second half was devoted to French composer Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, or Fantastic Symphony, an unusual piece, even 180 years after its debut. It runs about 45 minutes long, has five movements and a trippy narrative about an infatuated artist's opium-fueled dreams of love, obsession, rejection and sorcery.
It's a big, sprawling, everything-but-the-kitchen work, with oboes and bells being played in the wings, muscular blasts from a huge horn section (the orchestra swelled to about 80 musicians for it), pounding drums (and an expanded percussion section) and strings that swayed like the wind one minute and creeped like spiders the next.
It's a complicated piece, one that could have turned into a train wreck, and might have in other hands. The postured Handel, who grew more animated with each movement, kept it on track, on time and on the spot. There were no obvious stray or missed notes.
There was a moment during that crazy fifth movement where you could sense an almost magical connection between the music, the musicians and the conductor. Not only did the crowd respond with a loud and long standing ovation, but the musicians applauded him at length, something I haven't seen in three years of covering their concerts.
One of them said afterwards that this orchestra is capable of such playing, it just hasn't had anyone to help them attain it routinely in some time.
It's too early to tell if he's the one. After all, there are four more candidates to go, including Lawrence Loh of the Pittsburgh Symphony, who'll lead the Nov. 18-19 concerts. And who knows if Handel liked it here or will want the gig, if offered. He's up for five others.
But by making those musicians sound as good and alive as they did, and in such convincing fashion, Handel has to have established himself as a very strong front-runner in this six-man, eight-month horse race that ends in April.
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