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The San Antonio Symphony, above, played a key role in the recent Gurwitz International Piano Competition. It was yet another reminder of the beauty and necessity of the arts.
Photo: Billy Calzada / Staff PhotographerThe San Antonio Symphony, above, played a key role in the recent Gurwitz International Piano Competition. It was yet another reminder of the beauty and necessity of the arts.
The San Antonio Symphony, above, played a key role in the recent Gurwitz International Piano Competition. It was yet another reminder of the beauty and necessity of the arts.
The San Antonio Symphony, above, played a key role in the recent Gurwitz International Piano Competition. It was yet another reminder of the beauty and necessity of the arts.
“The Gurwitz and the Symphony” sounds like a classic children’s book. It’s a classic all right — a classic marriage of the most beautiful music on Earth.
Musical Bridges Around the World, or MBAW, is to be commended, indeed admired, for its entrepreneurial transformation of an annual piano competition into a world-class, worldwide named event — the Gurwitz International Piano Competition — executed in San Antonio this year and from this time forward. It puts our city on a map on which we barely featured until now.
As a board member of the symphony, I want to jump into the middle of the praise for MBAW and say, like a little kid madly waving her hand to be recognized, that the symphony had no small part in the glorious week of piano concerti San Antonio enjoyed as the brilliant young pianists played their way through the competition.
In fact, on the final night, when the winners played with the symphony onstage at the Tobin Center, the cheers for our symphony and symphony musicians were as loud as those for the finalists. Our maestro, Sebastian Lang-Lessing, and former “pianist-in-residence” Olga Kern were an integral part of the Gurwitz, serving as judges and performers. We symphony “insiders” felt huge pride in our orchestra; an event on the scale of this year’s Gurwitz competition spoke to the spirit of rich artistic collaboration that is part of the cultural footprint of our community.
Our city is a deeply special place, but its demographics don’t lend themselves to massive support for the performing arts, even with all their virtues. Those of us who think about the arts day and night and put ourselves on the line for them wish we could change facts, but we are realists — realists who are determined to do everything possible to keep the arts healthy. They should be baked into the cake, not just considered icing. To give up would be immoral in the extreme. Fighting for what’s right and just and good is the charge of all civilized people, no matter the odds. Martin Luther King Jr. urged us to rise above individualistic concerns and reach for the broader good.
This preachiness is a lapse into the reverie I periodically have about how our society is ordered. Of the largest cities in the country, San Antonio is the poorest. This means that human services take up a huge amount of charitable resources, and the arts must fend hard for the rest. It’s ironic that the symphony and other arts organizations struggle for support, yet when people attend performances, they are blown away that something that gorgeous is happening in our city. As a patron, an advocate, and a board member of the symphony, I am grateful for this reaction, but long for the audiences, the parents of the children who attend the symphony’s Young People’s Concerts, the parents of all the students who are tutored by our musicians, and everyone who has a stake in any of these activities to donate to ensure this art form and these artists continue to add value and cultural vitality back to our city.
I thank MBAW for its incredible work in the planning, logistics and execution of the Gurwitz. I thank Lang-Lessing, Kern and the other judges for their inspiring talent and music making. I thank our city and county, and our subscribers and donors for keeping the music playing. And I welcome everyone in San Antonio to visit our website — sasymphony.org — and put their money on us.
Taddy McAllister sits on the board of the San Antonio Symphony.
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February 24, 2020 at 08:05AM
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Commentary: Piano competition a dazzling argument for the arts in S.A. - mySanAntonio.com
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