Spokane Symphony Makes Music Dance
The Spokane Symphony The Opera House, Friday.
The Spokane Symphony danced Friday at the Opera House. Lest you get the notion that the orchestra players abandoned their instruments to do something strictly ballroom, it was the music of Copland, Beethoven and Prokofiev, not the musicians that danced.
Conductor Fabio Mechetti lent an assured latin swing to the complex rhythms of Copland’s “Danzon Cubano.” It was a flavorful opener. There were rhythmically solid, idiomatic solos from pianist Linda Siverts and some fine section playing in the trombones. Still, the performance was not a completely satisfying realization of Copland’s directions at the beginning of the score: “nonchalant but precise” - too much of the former and not nearly enough of the latter. The brass (trumpets in particular) never seemed quite crisply coordinated with the strings.
The most problematic work on Friday’s program was Beethoven’s Triple Concerto. Live performances always present the problem of balancing the violin, cello and piano soloists with each other and the solo group with the orchestra. Perhaps lining the soloists up across front center of the Opera House stage was the best solution available. The soloists, violinist Kelly Farris, cellist John Marshall and pianist Aida Mechetti, are certainly excellent players and sensitive musicians. But the inequities were awkward. Farris’ violin seemed too subdued throughout the concerto. Marshall, beautifully eloquent when playing alone (the lyric opening of the Largo was particularly poignant), was all too easily submerged in the sound of Aida Mechetti’s bold piano and any but the quietest orchestral playing.
Balance problems and some precarious intonation aside, the soloists sober earnestness in the finale seemed in defiance of Beethoven’s rollicking humor and dance-like energy. I wanted everybody (myself included) to be having more fun with all those dashing scales interspersed with flirtatious sighs.
The suite of six excerpts Mechetti selected from Prokofiev’s ballet “Romeo and Juliet” was excellently done from the angry dissonances introducing the warring clans of the Montagues and the Capulets to the somber funeral cortege for Romeo and Juliet which closed the suite. There is scarcely a page in this score which does not reveal Prokofiev as a master of orchestration and a composer who knows how to evoke the movement of dance even when no actual dancers are visible. Only Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky are his rivals.
The orchestras principal players were excellent in their solo turns. Mechetti brought a lithe grace to the scene of Romeo and Juliet’s Balcony Scene and a frantic, fearsome energy to the Dueling Scene in which Tybalt was killed. Mechetti and the orchestra made the music dance as only great ballet music can.
, DataTimes