Mechetti Duo Directs Symphony

Call it congenital talent. Musical ability sometimes runs in the family. Think of all those music-making Bachs, or the Mozarts - father, son and daughter.

Fabio Mechetti carries on a musical line as well. Mechetti, lest anyone forget, is in his fourth season as the Spokane Symphony’s music director. His great-grandfather was an organist in the Italian town of Lucca and a classmate of Lucca’s most famous son, Giacomo Puccini. An even earlier Mechetti was a music publisher who issued works by Beethoven, Schubert, Rossini, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Johann Strauss.

The two most recent generations of Mechettis will share the Opera House stage Friday when Mechetti’s father, Marcello, joins his son in a program of operatic overtures, dances and choruses with the Spokane Symphony and Symphony Chorale. The concert will feature works by Verdi, Borodin, Mascagni and Wagner.

“My grandfather left Italy in 1927,” the younger Mechetti recalled. “There was not much work for conductors in Europe in the hard period after the First World War. He was headed for Argentina and the famous Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, but on board the ship he met a woman who would become my grandmother. She was headed for Sao Paulo, so my grandfather decided to change his destination.”

The Mechetti family became a part of the very active Brazilian musical life in Sao Paulo. “My father literally grew up in the opera theater there,” Mechetti said. “As a little boy, he sang all those boy soprano parts in opera, like the Shepherd Boy in ‘La Boheme.’ So did I when I was little.”

After attending the Musical and Dramatic Conservatory there, Marcello Mechetti became a member of the staff of the Sao Paulo Opera Theater at age 22 and remained there more than 40 years until his retirement two years ago.

The senior Mechetti served as the chorusmaster of the opera and has conducted performances of the standard repertoire of operas by Rossini, Verdi and Puccini as well as unusual operas such as Carlos Gomes’ “Il Guarany” (a work currently enjoying a U.S. revival in Washington, D.C., starring Placido Domingo) as well as 20th-century operas by Bartok, Prokofiev and Menotti.

It was in the Sao Paulo Opera Theater where Fabio Mechetti decided to become a conductor. “Amazingly, I can even remember when I first heard an orchestra. It was in a performance of Massenet’s ‘Manon’ when I was 4 years old,” the conductor recalled in an interview when he accepted the Spokane music directorship in 1993. “When I first heard the orchestra sound, I wanted to become a conductor.”

The younger Mechetti became a student of the eminent Brazilian conductor Eleazar de Carvalho and later came to the United States, where he studied at the Juilliard School. While working on a doctorate in conducting at Juilliard, Mechetti became assistant conductor of the Spokane Symphony in 1984.

Unlike his father, however, Fabio Mechetti has been primarily a symphonic conductor, as music director of the Syracuse Symphony (a position he holds concurrently with his position here in Spokane), as resident conductor of the San Diego Symphony and as associate conductor of the National Symphony in Washington, D.C.

Friday’s program begins with the overture and two choruses from Verdi’s “Nabucco” followed by the “Polovtsian Dances” from Borodin’s “Prince Igor.” Also on the program are excerpts from Verdi’s “Aida” and Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana,” with soprano Susan Windham. The program will conclude with the “Venusburg Music” and the “Entry of the Nobles” from Wagner’s “Tannhauser.”

Marjory Halvorson, artistic director of Uptown Opera, will discuss the music in a pre-concert talk at 7 p.m. in the Opera House auditorium.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: The Spokane Symphony will perform at 8 p.m. Friday at the Spokane Opera House. Tickets are $13 to $28, available at the symphony ticket office (624-1200), G&B Select-a-Seat outlets or call (800) 325-SEAT.