Symphony goes clubbing

Musicians, some people say, can’t stay away from bars. The Spokane Symphony doesn’t deny it. This is the fourth season the orchestra has taken its players to one of Spokane’s most popular downtown night clubs – the Knitting Factory – for the Symphony on the Edge series.

The venue has the advantage of taking the symphony away from the formality and Art Deco elegance of it home at Martin Woldson Theater at The Fox (just a block away) and shifts the orchestra and its audience into an out-there mode that allows programming of music that might be too edgy for Classics or even Casual Classics concerts across the street.

“I wanted to give people, especially people who had never been to a symphony concert before, a chance to hear the orchestra playing music that belongs to our own time,” Eckart Preu, the symphony’s music director, said when he inaugurated the series in 2005.

Friday’s performance will include music by living composers such as Steve Reich, Chen Yi, Michael Daugherty and Hans-Peter Preu, the conductor’s brother. Established 20th-century composers like Manuel DeFalla and Dmitri Shostakovich are on the program, too, so is Frank Zappa with his “Tornado G-Spot.” (No, it’s better not even to ask.)

Several of the orchestra’s principal players will be featured on the concert. Clarinetist Chip Phillips will perform as the only live player in the finale of Reich’s “New York Counterpoint” for solo clarinet and 10 recorded clarinets. Concertmaster Mateusz Wolski will play the violin solo part of Chen Yi’s Chinese Folk Dance Suite. One of the orchestra’s newest members, pianist Mina Somekawa, will play the solo part of Daugherty’s wacky “Le Tombeau de Liberace.”

Contrabassoonist Luke Bakkan will perform Hans-Peter Preu’s “The Beastly Beast is Back,” a concerto written especially for Bakkan and the instrument he affectionately calls “Hagrid.” The beast in question is from Ravel’s “Beauty and the Beast” from his “Mother Goose” Suite.

For those who hanker for something more familiar, the concert will open with DeFalla’s “Ritual Fire Dance” and will include movements from Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony and Ernest Bloch’s Concerto Grosso No. 1.

Symphony on the Edge performances have some of the elements of a rock show, including concert lighting, amplification and big screen close-ups of the performers. Casual dress is suggested. And the symphony allows, even encourages, audience members to do something that is a definite no-no at the symphony’s formal concerts, namely, listen with a drink in hand (even an alcoholic drink if you can show proof of age). The music may be hot, but the