Soloists soar with Brahms
The Spokane Symphony gave its audience a double-barreled “Brahms Blast” Friday. The concert, conducted by symphony music director Eckert Preu, featured two of Brahms’ concertos in the hands of two commanding soloists.
The tribute to Brahms opened with the work of a composer who deeply admired Brahms and closed in an encore by a composer whose music Brahms himself adored.
Preu began with Anton von Webern’s warmly lyrical “Langsamer Satz” in an arrangement for string orchestra by Gerard Schwarz. Though the work was written in 1905, it was rediscovered after World War II by Spokane musicologist and Webern biographer Hans Moldenhauer.
The work is a deeply felt love song, and Preu made his strings sing it like one.
Jennifer Frautschi proved a fiercely intense soloist in Brahms’ Violin Concerto. As Preu pointed out in his remarks from the podium, Brahms’ concertos can be considered symphonies pretending to be concertos. And the conductor’s authoritative way with the complexities of the orchestral parts of both concertos showed just how true his observation was.
From the slashing energy she brought to the opening solo gesture of the Violin Concerto, it was clear Frautschi would not be overwhelmed by the symphonic density of the orchestra.
In the louder portions of the work, her approach might have been penalized for “unnecessary roughness.” Only when the textures of the work turned quiet and transparent did Frautschi show extraordinary beauty as she wove a subtle ornamental thread around the melodies of the orchestral strings or woodwinds.
The playing of the French horns was often coarse, especially noticeable in the slow movement. Frautschi seemed to take special delight in the Hungarian rhythmic snap and gypsy-fiddling melodic turns in the finale. Her performance was rewarded by a standing ovation.
Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1, the composer’s first large scale work for orchestra, “boils with testosterone right from its very opening,” Preu told the audience. And that very quality has always made the work as unruly as a teenager – and performances of this sprawling concerto often as messy as a teenager’s room.
Not so Friday night.
Brazilian-born pianist Arnaldo Cohen brought to the concerto a magisterial technique and a powerful musical intellect in one of the finest performances of the concerto I have heard. No technical difficulty seemed to faze Cohen – not those taxing chains of trills, not the playfulness of rapid chords, not the thunderous cascades of octaves.
Even more remarkable was the nocturne-like stillness he brought to the concerto’s slow movement. And Preu brought a beautiful clarity to the orchestral parts of the concerto. A well-deserved standing ovation brought Cohen back to the stage for a deliciously light, fleet performance of Chopin’s “Minute” Waltz.