Clarinetist Swings, Soars With Copland, Rossini

Spokane Symphony, with guest clarinetist Sharon Kam, Friday night at the Opera House.

The mime Marcel Marceau used to do a turn in which he imitated a clarinetist. He held no instrument, and there was no music, but Marceau bobbed and weaved, crouched and lifted his phantom clarinet to sky. Soon you heard music in your mind, and it was glorious.

Friday at the Opera House, Sharon Kam did the same thing but with a real clarinet. Her music, too, was glorious.

Kam is an astonishing player. She played Copland’s Clarinet Concerto and Rossini’s Introduction, Theme and Variations about as flawlessly as one is likely to hear in a live concert. Kam’s tone was beautifully controlled throughout an enormous dynamic range from whisper soft to penetratingly loud. This young Israeli-born, New York-trained virtuoso handled Copland’s jazz licks like a natural, and sang away at Rossini’s soaring coloratura melodies like a veteran opera singer.

Kam’s highly physical way of playing is greatly distracting to some (me, for instance), but it’s a price one has to pay for hearing the compelling work of a musician like the late Glenn Gould or, nowadays, Nadia Salerno-Sonnenberg or Cecila Bartoli or Sharon Kam.

As with Gould, Kam sometimes allows physical mannerism to intrude on the music. Her Rossini had scarely a phrase that was not fussed over or a cadence whose tempo was not pulled this way or that.

Throughout the solo works, conductor Fabio Mechetti and the orchestra provided excellent, stylish support - even in Kam’s wayward Rossini.

After intermission, the orchestra was on its own in Rachmaninoff’s dangerously difficult, hour-long Symphony No. 2. Mechetti guided the orchestra through the work’s dangers into its great beauties. It is startling to hear in a symphony written early in this century the sound associated with those luxuriously orchestrated film scores of the 1940s and ‘50s. Hollywood composers in those days unashamedly raided the melancholy lyricism of Rachmaninoff’s slow movements and the frantic excitement of his scherzos and finales.

Not all was flawless in Friday’s performance; there were times in fast passages where intonation in the violins’ upper reaches was only approximate and a few occasions when brass entrances were not perfectly coordinated. Far more important, though, to the success of this symphony was the fervent intensity Mechetti elicited from the orchestra throughout the symphony’s fatiguing length and the clarity of detail he brought to its dense textures.

The delicately scored ending of the Adagio was especially beautiful.

This performance featured some outstanding solo playing, none more moving than the long clarinet solo in the Adagio played by Virginia Jones. She was one of the 21 players in the orchestra recognized for having played for more than 20 years with the symphony. Bravo to them all!

, DataTimes