Wagner’s Work Full Of Energy

Symphony SuperPops Saturday, The Spokane Opera House

Walt Wagner just won’t quit.

After three short symphonic pieces, buoyantly led by Jung-Ho Pak, the evening was Wagner’s. The pianist and this trio gave the Saturday’s SuperPops audience a generous 14 selections. He played hundreds of thousands of notes, all of them delivered with Wagner’s seemingly boundless supply of energy (and amplified, too).

I don’t know about Wagner, but I, for one, left the concert exhausted.

Wagner commands an armory of heavy pianistic artillery - glittering scales, cascading arpeggios, and, his specialty, rapidly alternating chords with his hands operating with the speed of a jackhammer. The two longest pieces were a concerto-like treatment of the theme from “Chariots of Fire” and a rambling, jazzy improvisation on Wagner’s anthem, “MacArthur Park.”

What I admired most about Wagner music playing lay not in these over-long and, let’s face it, pretentious arrangements, but in Wagner’s quiet pieces like “Child’s Play,” a simple tune provided with a cushion of quiet strings and an economic al accompaniment and the frolicsome humor of “Dixieland” with its a ragtimey stride, sudden stop motions, and its dandy solos from trombonist Nat Wickham, alto Paul Plowman and trumpeter And Plamondon.

By comparison, the trio’s drummer, Mark Ivester seemed underused.

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