Symphonic Valentines Spokane Symphony Performance Offers Romantic Touch; Trumpet Soloist Shines In Difficult Pieces

Spokane Symphony Orchestra Friday, Feb. 14, Spokane Opera House

Friday was a day for exchanging valentines.

The audience gave the Spokane Symphony the kind of greeting every arts organization loves - a sold-out house. The orchestra, under the baton of guest conductor Uriel Segal, reciprocated with warm romanticism in works by Dvorak and Tchaikovsky.

Trumpet soloist Allen Vizzutti provided playing that was simply astounding. The trumpet gives no leeway for mistakes. Play a wrong note, make a fuzzy tone, and there it is, squarely in every listener’s ear.

Vizzutti gave no one any worries. His was as nearly flawless as one can expect in a live performance.

Vizzutti presides over a great range of styles. He played with classically pure taste in Haydn’s Trumpet, he flew with ease through the daring acrobatics of his own “Emerald” Concerto, and he improvised songfully to his wife’s piano accompaniment in an encore, Mel Torme’s “My Funny Valentine.”

The Haydn concerto sounds simple. It’s not, though.

Late in life, Haydn boiled down his mastery of the intricacies of symphonic form into this 15-minute concerto. Its compositional perfection - melodies that seem to sing themselves, textures that always appear ideally balanced, and the fun of Haydn’s harmonic surprises - demands playing perfection as well.

Vizzutti gave Haydn his due with a tone that sang and ornamental figures that were models of clarity.

Vizzutti’s “Emerald” Concerto sounded anything but simple. It exhibited a glittering display of virtuosity that would have staggered Haydn.

Ostensibly, the work is a tribute to Seattle, where the composer-soloist lives, suggesting the city’s busy rhythms, the wheeling flights of gulls and the lush green scenery of the area.

I found the concerto instead a tribute to Vizzutti’s own virtuosity - his sure-footed skips of register, his dazzling double and triple-tonguing, and his high notes that pierce the aural stratosphere. Vizzutti gave the kind of thrill in the sheer physicality of music-making one hears in works of such violinist-composers as Wieniawski or Sarasate.

Segal, the evening’s guest conductor, has a conducting style very much in the romantic tradition. He uses large, circular gestures that elicited a warm tone and beautifully phrased melodic lines. The size and fluidity of those gestures caused the Spokane players to respond tentatively in the strongly rhythmic passages of Dvorak’s Scherzo Capriccoso and even a bit sluggishly in Vizzutti’s “Emerald” Concerto.

But Segal’s approach proved ideal for the lyricism and surging climaxes of the Dvorak Scherzo and for the elegance and richness of Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty” Suite.

The humor he drew from the orchestral meowing in the “Puss-in-Boots” episode of the Tchaikovsky suite added a witty touch to this symphonic valentine.

, DataTimes