Symphony weekend show will have European flair

The Spokane Symphony this weekend will take its audiences on a European exploration of late romanticism and the beginning of impressionism.

Conductor Eckart Preu will lead a program of works by Ravel and Webern, with pianist Alexandre Moutouzkine as soloist in Scriabin’s Piano Concerto in F-sharp minor.

The Spokane Symphony Chorale will join the orchestra for the first of two suites from Ravel’s ballet “Daphnis et Chloe.”

“I especially wanted to do the First Suite because you don’t hear it so often as the Second,” Preu says. “It was important for me to do it in the version with the chorus; I always miss the emotional element the chorus adds when it done in the version for orchestra alone.”

Preu says he conducted Scriabin’s Piano Concerto several years ago.

“I have always liked Scriabin, even the short piano pieces,” he says. “It’s quite refreshing to hear a Russian concerto that is not Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff, even though they are wonderful.

“And this piece has a little bit of both in it, but it’s still different. It sounds something like Chopin with a little more edginess. It’s not played nearly often enough.”

Soloist Moutouzkine was born in Russia in Yoshkar-Ola, some 350 miles east of Moscow, the child of a family of professional musicians.

After studying a the Nizhniy-Novgorod Conservatory, Moutouzkine won the St. Petersburg Competition when he was 14. Since then, he has won prizes in a number of international piano competitions including a Special Award for Artistic Potential at the 11th Van Cliburn Competition in 2001, when he was 19.

Moutouzkine now lives in New York City.

“I had read about him about two years ago,” Preu says. “So when I was in New York, I called him up and asked him if he would play for me.

“He had won several competitions, but you just don’t really know what a musician is like until you actually hear that person play. He is so very non-diva-ish, unlike some Russian pianists we can name, but he plays extremely beautifully.”

To match Scriabin’s late romanticism and link to Ravel’s impressionism, Preu looked to Germany. He found what he was looking for by studying the catalog of the Moldenhauer Archives, a list of the manuscripts collected by Spokane musicologist Hans Moldenhauer, a great authority on the works of Anton von Webern.

Though Webern later turned to a highly condensed, challenging dissonant style, his early work is very musical in the expansive, late romantic vein.

His “Im Sommerwind” will open this weekend’s concerts. He wrote the piece in 1904 when he was taking a summer holiday in southern Austria from his studies at the University of Vienna.

“Webern’s ‘Im Sommerwind’ – he called it an ‘Idyll for Large Orchestra’ – is a kind of German approach to impressionism, with some Wagner and some Strauss and whoever you want to find there,” says Preu.

“I think it is an ideal beginning to this concert. And it will give us an international balance of something German, something French and something Russian.”

Preu will discuss the music on this weekend’s program in pre-concert talks one hour before each performance.