Orchestral trip around the world

Morihiko Nakahara, the Spokane Symphony’s resident conductor, took the audience at the Fox into three radically different sound worlds Saturday night. Works by Joseph Hadyn, Jean Sibelius and Akira Nishimura covered more than two centuries of musical styles and geography from Japan to Austria to Finland.

An orchestra can inhabit a musical style or it can impose its own style on all kinds of music of any time or place. In other words, it can serve as an eloquent actor or as a good entertainer. Under its two exceptional conductors, music director Eckart Preu and Nakahara, the Spokane Symphony has proved it can be a great actor. Saturday’s performance was a good exhibit.

Nakahara opened the concert with a stunningly radical sound experience in Nishimura’s “The Birds Heterophony.” This 1993 work uses exotic instruments such as bamboo chimes and steel drums, and an extraordinary number of unusual techniques on the orchestra’s usual instruments. The result was waves of sounds that buzzed, chirped, squealed and churned like the chaotic sounds of nature highly magnified. A walk in the very wild woods.

It took some getting used to. But Nishimura gave the audience time to get adjusted to this wild world – maybe, at nearly 20 minutes, a little too much time. For me and for many, though, the work was hugely effective. For something totally different from Mishimura’s radicalism, the young American cellist Julie Albers joined the orchestra as soloist in Haydn’s Cello Concerto in D major. Albers’ elegance and technical assurance showed a firm grip on Haydn’s songful melodies and dancing playfulness.

Most classical music buffs are so conscious of Haydn the symphonist or Hadyn the string quartet writer, we need reminding that Hadyn wrote lots of operas and other vocal music. Albers not only made Haydn’s concerto sing, but she also unleashed his playful side in outbursts of technical display, as well. It all looked so easy and sounded so natural.

Since Haydn did not write solo cadenzas for this concerto himself, Albers played the stylish ones written by the 20th-century French cellist Maurice Gendron.

After intermission, the orchestra shifted its sound from the courtly elegance of Haydn to the juicy romanticism of Sibelius. The Finnish master’s Symphony No. 2 may have been written in Italy, but Sibelius was dreaming of Finland. Nakahara and the orchestra plunged Saturday’s audience into chill winds and the desolation of a northern winter. There is nothing else quite like the way Sibelius makes the sunny Big Tune of the finale explode from the quiet episode that ends the third movement.

There were many details to admire: the combination of solo woodwinds in the first movement, the ominous cello and bass pizzicatos introducing the Andante, and the frantic energy of the racing string in the scherzo.

But the unrelenting energy Nakahara brought to the work – whether the tempo was fast or slow – is what made Saturday’s performance a special experience.