Spokane Symphony review: Guest conductor brings fresh perspective

For the sixth of this season’s Classics Concerts presented by the Spokane Symphony at the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox, music director Eckart Preu handed the reins to a guest, the distinguished Canadian conductor Marco Parisotto.

This allowed the orchestra to be exposed to a musician employing a different technique, who had experienced different influences, and who, as it turned out, had a strikingly different sort of orchestral sonority in his ears. The audience benefited too, of course, by enjoying a fresh perspective on familiar music, and by seeing just how capable their orchestra is in taking on, chameleon-like, the attributes of a different leader.

Parisotto wasted no time in displaying the power and clarity of his conducting technique in leading the orchestra through “Aqua,” a 2015 work for large orchestra by Canadian composer Vivian Fung. The work is meant to communicate the experience of viewing the Aqua Building, a 2010 addition to Chicago’s assortment of architectural landmarks. (Search Google Images for “aqua building Chicago” to see for yourself.)

The rippling, curvaceous form of the skyscraper is suggested by a succession of sounds produced both by conventional symphonic instruments and by some novel additions, such as gamelan, prepared piano and finger cymbals. Parisotto’s precise and expressive gestures controlled at every instant Fung’s dramatic patterns of sound, seemingly random and unpredictable. Every instrumental entrance, every swelling or fading, every change of timbre was clearly initiated from the podium. He chose to go without a baton in directing “Aqua,” and employed a fluttering gesture of his left hand to communicate his wish for a sound more evocative of waves and clouds than sharp edges and bright light. The effect was striking, delightful and often beautiful.

The baton appeared for the second work on the program, Piotr Tchaikovsky’s orchestral fantasy “Francesca da Rimini,” an 1876 musical evocation not of architecture, but of poetry, in which the composer seeks to encapsulate in sound the emotions he felt in reading Canto Five of Dante’s “Inferno.” Here, Dante and Virgil come upon the souls of Francesca da Rimini and her lover, Paolo, condemned by eternal justice to swirl through eternity, buffeted by harsh winds, conjoined but unable to consummate their love. It is a tale filled with elements bound to delight Tchaikovsky’s Romantic sensibility: tender passion, tragic death and eternal suffering.

Parisotto intensified the dramatic impact of the tone poem by making each passage as vivid as possible, asking the strings to dig more deeply into each bowing, increasing the brazen intensity of passages in the brass, and encouraging timpanist Adam Wallstein to shoot thunderbolts from his vantage point at the rear of the orchestra. Other conductors might have placed more emphasis on the arch of the narrative, or held back at some points in order to build more gradually to a climax, but Parisotto maximized the impact of every phrase. The effect was electric. At the conclusion, the audience leapt shouting to its feet, acclaiming the achievement of the conductor and the orchestra.

Much the same approach was applied to the program’s concluding work, Jean Sibelius’ 1902 Symphony No. 2 in D major Op. 43, with somewhat more mixed results.

The orchestra continued to play magnificently, and Parisotto’s mastery of the score remained undiminished. The issue lay in the difference between Sibelius’ reticent and elusive rhetoric and the more spectacular and effusive character of both Fung and Tchaikovsky. Sibelius’ Second Symphony is not wanting in either dramatic turmoil or heroic utterance expressed in stirring melody.

These qualities, however, are balanced with and draw their force from passages of much lower emotional temperature, suggesting village dances, spare, static vistas, and moments of quiet anxiety. Parisotto’s tendency toward brisk, unyielding tempos and saturated orchestral tone did not allow the moments of quiet stillness or ambivalence to land their full effect. Thus, when in the final movement Sibelius depicts a kind of triumphant overcoming of doubt and adversity, the effect was not as telling as it might have been. Nevertheless, the combination of professional skill and communicative urgency Marco Parisotto demonstrated throughout the evening left the audience grateful for his visit to Spokane, and eager for his return.

A recording of this concert will be broadcast at 7 p.m. Monday on Spokane Public Radio, 91.1 FM.