Fiddler-composer brings out best

Listening to four developmental levels of the Spokane Youth Symphony in one show is the musical equivalent of watching sausage being made.

But famed fiddler-composer Mark O’Connor didn’t wince and wait for the top-of-the-line product before stepping onstage at the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox Sunday evening.

First he graced intermediate-level strings players, some of whose feet dangled inches above the floor as they sat in their chairs. O’Connor, 44, played the first five pieces from his “Strings & Threads Suite” as though he were being backed up by a big-city professional orchestra.

Neither distracted nor deterred by occasional issues with squeaks, rhythm and intonation of fledgling musicians, the Washington-raised musical genius – at the age of 9 he was teaching guitar lessons – moved on to the Junior Orchestra and let his fiddle heat up a little more.

He highlighted this next level of youth musicality with three more pieces from the suite before bringing quart-size Viktor Black out from the middle of the violin section to wow the nearly full house with a Pickin’ Parlor Rag duet.

“The pleasure was mine,” O’Connor told Black as he shook the young man’s hand and waited for an ebb in the long wave of applause.

Horns and woodwinds joined the strings in the next level – the Junior Symphonic Orchestra – and accompaniment in the next four pieces became more refined, as though O’Connor’s bow for the first half of the show had been whittling a promising piece of wood into something more defined.

Then the area’s all-star teen musical team – the Spokane Youth Orchestra – took the stage and played hardball with the A-Rod of new American classical music.

O’Connor took advantage of the spit-polished accompaniment to play the Second Movement of his “Fiddle Concerto,” as the program notes pegged it, “moderately slow, sweetly yearning, elegantly, with dignity, somberly, heavily, with passion.”

Next, pint-size Drew Keeve braved the stage with his viola, bringing his cellist brother, Philip, for support as they joined O’Connor in a trio to play the composer’s “Chief Sitting in the Rain.” The performance was so hot, big brother couldn’t help but give his little brother a one-handed atta-boy head rub as the audience roared its approval.

Finally, everyone, including the young musicians, sat back and listened to O’Connor put the fastest fingers in the fiddling world to work in a solo performance that brought the crowd to its feet.

His encore was “America the Beautiful” as few have heard it before, except certainly those who listened to his solo performance for the national memorial to the Space Shuttle Columbia crew. Maybe he knew astronaut Michael Anderson was a local boy.

He played an arrangement some fiddlers have called borderline impossible with a breathless passion to a last note that faded into the heavens.

The theater would not be that quiet again until the janitor locked the doors Sunday night.

Classical music fans occasionally wonder what it must have been like to hear legendary composers perform their own works.

Now we know.