Orchestra Soars Before Empty Chairs

The Spokane Symphony Benefit with Andre Watts Opera House, Friday

Music and art show the way humans deal with adversity. The Spokane Symphony used music Friday to help overcome the adverse effects to its budget caused by last November’s ice storm. The result was an artistic triumph, but a financial failure.

By performing a benefit concert for itself, the orchestra had hoped to make up a sizable deficit created by low ticket sales in November and December.

Conductor Fabio Mechetti and the musicians donated their services. Pianistic superstar Andre Watts came at a greatly reduced fee. But only a few more than 900 people bought tickets.

The audience in the 2,300-seat Opera House looked embarrassingly sparse. Mechetti chose two Beethoven overtures to open the program, the Overture to “Egmont” and the third “Leonore” Overture, one of the four overtures Beethoven composed for his only opera. Mechetti and the orchestra captured the triumphant spirit of both works.

Well played as both Beethoven overtures were, nothing else on Friday’s concert could compare with the fervor Watts and Mechetti brought to Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1.

Watts brings a visceral energy to every note he plays - an approach that is tailor-made for the intensity in the wide ranging moods found in this concerto. Brahms fierce musical rhetoric in the first movement is matched in the Adagio by passages of tenderness unsurpassed anywhere else in Brahms works (or anyone else’s). And the finale is a rush of energy.

The first movement demands the soloist to make the piano roar with anguish in cascades of stormy octaves, sparkle with chains of prolonged trills and sing majestic hymns with fistfuls of huge chords. Watts did all that in a way that made the symphony’s new Steinway shake.

But he also brought a loving simplicity to those poignant melodies in the slow movement. Was it the same pianist? And surely it must have been yet a third player who led the dashing charge through the Rondo finale. Could one pianist alone have that much stamina? The answer is “yes.”

From first note to last, Watts never seemed to hold anything back. His was playing that took every dare Brahms presented, racing right along the cliff’s edge. It was a rare, heady experience to hear a pianist so much in control that he seemed utterly without fear. Watt was supported by excellent orchestral playing and Mechetti’s authoritative conducting.

I recall Watts’ first performance with this orchestra nearly 20 years ago in this very concerto. It was very good then. It was great Friday.

The only thing missing was a standing-room-only crowd. , DataTimes