In Praise Of Great Music Spokane Symphony Orchestra Celebrates Its 50th Season In Style With A Gala Celebration

Golden anniversary celebrations exhibit some standard features: food, drink, speeches, best wishes. The gala surrounding the Spokane Symphony Orchestra’s 50th had those ingredients and more. The Spokane Symphony’s 50th season featured a catered dinner for symphony supporters, a champagne and cake reception for concertgoers, a mayoral proclamation declaring the season to be The Year of the Symphony, and a narration of the accomplishments of the symphony and its music directors.

But it was the orchestra’s Opera House concert Saturday that showed what the partying and praise was all about, the fine playing of great music.

Three conductors shared the symphony’s handsome new podium - former music directors Donald Thulean and Gunther Schuller and the orchestra’s present conductor Fabio Mechetti.

Thulean opened the concert with the salsa flavor of Aaron Copland’s “El Salon Mexico.” The high spirits of Copland’s exotic classic and some splendid solo playing recalled the adventurous years of Thulean’s leadership when the Spokane Symphony grew from a good community orchestra to an excellent all-professional group.

The concert’s most treasurable performance was Beethoven’s “Leonore” Overture No. 3 led by Schuller. The work is so frequently performed that most professional orchestra players could play it in their sleep. Schuller’s attention to the interplay of Beethoven’s accent patterns and his careful pacing of the overture’s slowly building intensity made the score’s final pages a shattering experience.

The most moving portion of the concert came in a conductor-less performance of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. This work was last performed by the orchestra in 1987 under the baton of then-music director Bruce Ferden who died in 1993. Ferden, a severe taskmaster, would have had only praise for the precision and tonal warmth of the symphony’s string players.

Mechetti chose two works to end the season-opener which showed just what his orchestra (and ours) can do. In the orchestral excepts from Berlioz’s “Damnation of Faust,” you learn if an orchestra can play delicately and whether it can swagger without vulgarity. The “Firebird” Suite will tell you whether it can whisper and roar while juggling Stravinsky’s fiercely complex rhythms.

Well, Mechetti showed us that his orchestra does all these things quite nicely, thank you. From the elegantly twittering flutes of Berlioz’s “Minuet of the Sprites” to the menacing thunderclaps of Stravinsky’s “Infernal Dance of Prince Kastchai,” the orchestra demonstrated an impressive and growing level of technical and artistic mastery.

Saturday’s capacity audience paid a well-deserved tribute to the orchestra and its three conductors with a prolonged standing ovation. With playing like this at the beginning of the season, the future of the golden anniversary year looks bright, indeed.