Review: Spokane Symphony rocks the Big Easy
The first half began with a distorted Hendrix-like solo on electric cello. The second half began with Elvis, in full Vegas rhinestone outfit, ripping through a bassoon piece.
And then things got truly wild.
Symphony on the Edge is designed to be edgy, with the Spokane Symphony playing new and avant-garde pieces in a raucous nightclub setting. Yet Friday night’s concert seemed even further out than usual – which was perfectly fine by me.
The entire evening would have been worth it merely for the world premiere of “Parallels,” a jazzy, flashy juggernaut by Spokane composer, conductor and jazz pianist Don Goodwin. This piece, which closed the concert, was rich with bright washes of sound and flashes of brilliant complexity. Complexity was in plentiful supply at this concert, but Goodwin’s piece managed to conjure up an entire jaunty world, like the soundtrack to a particularly wonderful movie cartoon.
Another piece by a Spokane composer, Jonathan Middleton, “Reciprocal Refractions,” was based on a mathematical algorithm. I’m not even sure exactly what that means, except to say it was incredibly complex and dense – like music conjured out of several million computer calculations.
Conductor Morihiko Nakahara certainly prepared us well for these pieces, introducing each in his charming and disarmingly quirky manner. For instance, he told us that Stravinsky’s “Ragtime” was like a “Scott Joplin rag deconstructed.”
That was an understatement. It sounded like a Scott Joplin rag hacked to bits with an axe.
In a couple of cases, the composers themselves delivered video and audio introductions on the Big Easy’s big screen. Missy Mazzoli, of Brooklyn, introduced her “These Worlds Within Us,” which turned out to be so powerful and full of drama that we can forgive her for pronouncing the word Spokane wrong.
Dan Visconti also introduced his “Black Bend,” inspired by tales of a disastrous train wreck in Ohio. This was one of the evening’s finest and most powerful pieces, distinguished by a slow build, like a train gaining steam, and a bluesy bass line.
Still, for sheer entertainment value, it was hard to beat the sight of the principal bassoonist, Lynne Feller-Marshall, in an Elvis wig and white Elvis suit, blowing the wild strains of Michael Daugherty’s “Dead Elvis.” The packed house went into a mini-Elvis-frenzy when the melody of “It’s Now or Never” briefly emerged.
The only thing that whipped the crowd into a bigger frenzy was the sound of John Marshall (her husband) ripping into his electric cello, which looked like a skeleton version of a regular cello. His distorted, fuzzed-out cascade of notes sounded less like a cello than a Dimebag Darrell guitar solo. Then, with a punch of a foot pedal, the same instrument would sing sweetly to an almost Mozartian accompaniment.
Just when we were lulled to complacency, he’d tap his pedal and the rip-saw was back.
“Rock and roll!” yelled an audience member.
Maybe, but this evening was so much more.