Stunning Finale It Was A Powerful Season-Ending Performance With Two Orchestras, 300 Singers And A Trio Of Soloists, All On The Opera House Stage
Spokane Symphony Orchestra Friday, May 12, at the Opera House
The Spokane Symphony ended its 1994-95 season with an outstanding performance that surely has seen few equals in the orchestra’s 49-year history. Symphonic seasons usually conclude in a glorious blaze of orchestral sound. Friday’s concert ended in a barely audible hush with the Spokane Symphony Chorale singing, unaccompanied, the final “Amen” of Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem.”
The 85-minute work stood alone on the program and was performed without intermission.
The effect was stunning in the true sense of that word. After the emotional blows of the “War Requiem” concluded, a dazed applause began slowly after a moment of silence. Only during the curtain calls did the appropriate standing ovation begin.
Music Director Fabio Mechetti chose the “War Requiem” to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. It is hard to imagine a more moving or a more imposing work for the occasion. The text combines the Latin words of the Mass for the Dead with bitter, ironic commentary drawn from the anti-war poetry of the English pacifist and a hero of the First World War, Wilfred Owen.
Britten wrote the “War Requiem” for a performance at St. Michael’s Cathedral in Coventry, a town leveled by German bombing in 1940. This extraordinarily complex music calls for a huge force of performers, originally arrayed in various places throughout the cathedral.
Friday’s performance used nearly 300 singers and players crowded onto the Opera House stage. The symphony players were divided into two orchestras - a larger group led by Mechetti and a chamber orchestra conducted by Peter Rubhardt. In addition to the Symphony Chorale, expertly prepared by Randi Ellefson, there were the voices of the Spokane Area Children’s Chorus led by Tamara Schupman. The Opera House stage seems not the ideal placement perhaps, considering Britten’s dramatic conception of the use of space. But only a few minutes into the performance, I forgot about the stage congestion.
Mechetti assembled a trio of outstanding soloists: soprano Julie Newell, tenor Jon Garrison and baritone Frank Hernandez.
Newell possesses an astonishingly beautiful voice - a clear, powerful (but never strident) soprano that can sigh in the tearful “Lacrimosa” or shout in the threatening “Liber scriptus.” Garrison movingly set Owen’s tone of anger and frustration in the opening line of “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” And it will be hard for me to forget the emotional heaviness in Hernandez’s singing the simple repetitions of the words “resigned” and “shadow” in Owen’s “Bugles Sang.”
Spokane Symphony audiences are used to high-quality choral singing, so neither the neatly enunciated Latin of the Symphony chorale nor the innocent lightness of the Children’s Chorus came as a surprise.
Were there mistakes? The few included an early entry by one of the women of the chorale, a single misremembered line by Hernandez and a moment of confusion with the children’s chorus in the “Libera me.” None of these robbed the performance of its shattering power.
Mechetti and Rubardt coordinated their numerous forces to achieve a memorable performance of great musical depth.