Review: Three pieces beautifully illustrate Spokane Symphony’s range, capabilities

Though Saturday’s concert by the Spokane Symphony at the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox contained only three pieces, it did an excellent job of illustrating the immense range and variety of experience that a symphony orchestra can bring us. There was no star soloist on the program, which allowed the spotlight to shine on the orchestra itself, some of its featured members and its conductor, Eckart Preu.

Only a fraction of the full orchestra was onstage for the opening work on the program, J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 in F major, BMV 1046, a work of inexhaustible wit and peerless creativity that brings to the fore Bach’s virtuoso writing.

Bach knew how to dazzle an audience: In the First Brandenburg Concerto, we heard playing especially from the horns and double-reed instruments that required, and demonstrated, the very highest level of skill. Passages for solo violin were taken by the orchestra’s concertmaster, Mateusz Wolski. Preu directed from the keyboard of a beautifully decorated harpsichord, though, regrettably, little of his playing was audible in so large an auditorium.

In remarks made from the stage before the concert, principal horn Erica Browne disclosed that she had to go into training for a month in order to feel ready to meet the challenges of Bach’s writing for horn in this piece, which she performed on a descant horn in order to accommodate the very high range. She and colleague Chuck Karschney negotiated the thicket of trills, skips and ornaments Bach strewed in their path with apparent ease and spotless intonation.

With the arrogance of genius, Bach tosses a brief dialogue between oboes, bassoon and violin into the fourth movement that lesser composers (i.e., everyone else) would have given their eye teeth to have written.

Adding a dose of pepper to the warmth of the horns, principal oboe Keith Thomas played with his customary agility and impeccable taste, abetted by his colleagues Sheila McNally-Armstrong and Bethany Schoeff. The bassoon part was played with great personality by principal Lynne Feller-Marshall.

After presenting a work of such astringent clarity, it was audacious of Preu to program something of such utterly different character as Osvaldo Golijov’s (b. 1960) “Sidereus,” a work for small orchestra composed in 2010.

In this brief work, Golijov endeavors to suggest the impact made on a sensitive mind in contemplating the splendor and enormity of the universe. He is a master of orchestration, and places the darkness of the lower strings and brass against delicate figures in the highest reaches of the violins to suggest galaxies shimmering against a background of timeless black. Woven through this tone painting are melodies and motifs that suggest the positive wonderment and inspiration of the human onlooker.

It is remarkable that elements of both the Bach concerto and the Golijov tone poem are drawn on by Anton Bruckner (1824-96) in his Symphony No. 6 in A major of 1881. People who listen to Bruckner hoping to hear an update of the symphonies of Beethoven are bound to be disappointed.

Beethoven achieved in his art what he was never able to find in life: order, clarity and coherence. Bruckner reproduces in his gigantic symphonies the frustrations, disappointments and incoherence that make up much of the human condition. Consequently, Saturday’s audience had to negotiate sudden changes in dynamics and harmony, unprepared appearances or disappearances of themes, and a host of shocking stops and starts in their journey through Bruckner’s craggy landscape.

In remarks from the podium, Preu promised his audience “not a stroll, but a hike.” Fortunately, we had the right guide, for Preu, it must be said, is a great Bruckner conductor. Perhaps there is something in the water in East Germany, but conductors from that part of the world seem to possess insight into Bruckner’s world and can help us see what Bruckner has achieved: the sort of compassionate detachment and comprehension of human life that a devout Catholic like Bruckner ascribed to God himself.

Without rushing, Preu maintained an urgent pulse that runs constantly beneath the surface of the music, tying together motives and revealing correspondences between sections that seem on their face to be unrelated.

In this, he could draw on a quality of playing from the Spokane Symphony that has been remarked on in this column before. It continues to amaze. The depth and beauty of the tone in the violins, which was striking in the first movement, seemed to grow more lush and intense in the second. The roundness and color of the brass tone was in the Bruckner segment allied to a degree of stamina that seemed almost superhuman. Saturday’s audience applauded not only for what they had heard, but for what they knew lies ahead.