Jung-Ho Pak Shows Vigor, Class In Symphony Conducting Debut

Spokane Symphony Orchestra Sunday, Oct. 20, The Met

A large, enthusiastic audience greeted the Spokane conducting debut of Jung-Ho Pak and the return of Spokane-born pianist Stephen Drury in an all-Mozart program performed by the Spokane Symphony Sunday at The Met.

The afternoon concert crowd clearly approved of the symphony’s choice of Pak as the orchestra’s associate conductor and of the brilliance of Drury’s pianism.

Those who did not spend Sunday afternoon with Mozart, Pak and Drury will have another chance tonight. Here is my advice: Cancel whatever else you had planned and attend this concert.

Pak’s selection of all-Mozart - a great composer whose music everybody knows and most people love - for his debut would perhaps seem a safe choice. It isn’t.

In Mozart, there is no hiding behind Wagnerian bombast or Tchaikovsky’s luxurious washes of tone color. Mozart reveals everything.

Pak is a musician who combines good taste and energetic enthusiasm. And that enthusiasm carried over into his articulate, informative and witty spoken program notes during which the audience learned about Mozart’s orchestration and about dancing the minuet.

The concert contained some surprises.

Pak had his orchestra (strings only) stand for the performance of the opening Divertimento in D major. Only the cellos sat.

It would have been done that way in Mozart’s time. The result was an alertness and freedom that was a perfect fit for this youthful music. (Mozart was 20 when he wrote it.) Pak also changed the arrangement of the orchestra on the stage: First and second violins faced one another across the stage, basses were placed behind the first violins, and cellos were to the conductor’s left and violas to his right.

The result was clearer emphasis on what Pak called “the stereophonic effects” Mozart uses between first and second violins and a most resonant bass and middle register in a hall that emphasizes the treble register.

Pak does not use a baton, and he does use larger, more fluid gestures than Mozart’s music seems to invite. Yet, the musical result had rhythmic vitality and songfulness.

Imprecisions in evidence Sunday will probably go away as the players become more familiar with Pak’s conducting style.

Drury was splendid in Mozart’s Concerto in A major (K. 488). This concerto is so familiar, as Drury himself admitted, what can a pianist do to make it fresh?

What Drury did was to play it like chamber music, enjoying (and letting the audience enjoy) such Mozartian dialogues as the piano’s lyric exchange with the bassoon and its insistent repeated-note reply to the flute in the Andante.

Drury’s solo cadenza for the first movement combined Mozart’s own written-out improvisation with some of the soloist’s own stylish and inventive additions.

Pak’s concept of the just-as-familiar Symphony in G minor was charged with drama and energy. The opening Molto Allegro was startlingly brisk, and the abrupt rhythms of the Andante took on an ominous quality.

Mozart’s mood swings might have been further intensified with greater attention to softer playing when the music called for it. But Pak always gave a full measure of vitality and care to Mozart’s ideas.

Pak is a welcome attention to the Spokane musical scene and Drury’s occasional returns are always a pleasure.

, DataTimes MEMO: The concert will be repeated tonight at 7:30 at The Met; tickets are $19, $15, $13 and $9.