Lehwalder’s Accompaniment Shines

(From For the Record, February 18, 1998): Symphony correction: The principal horn player in the Spokane Symphony is Margaret Wilds. A concert review in Tuesday’s IN Life section indicated otherwise.

The Spokane Symphony Friday, Feb. 13, Opera House (The concert was repeated Saturday in Coeur d’Alene.)

Once in a while, classical music audiences get a chance to see and hear a musician who has formed an identification with a work the way rock stars and pop singers do with their material. Heidi Lehwalder did just that Friday playing Alberto Ginastera’s Harp Concerto with the Spokane Symphony. She played with the commanding assurance and verve that suggested she was made for Ginastera’s concerto and it was made for her.

Lehwalder has performed Ginastera’s Concerto many times. She played it here, in fact, in 1985. But her playing of it remains as fresh as wet ink.

The work is loaded with formidable technical challenges for the harpist - some are unorthodox sounds such as tapping on the instrument’s soundboard with the knuckles, playing glissandos with the fingernails, or rubbing the strings vertically to achieve whistling effects, other passages call for a perfectly ordinary harp technique, but are simply very difficult in terms of speed and dexterity. Lehwalder surmounted those difficulties with the aplomb and grace of an Olympic athlete and the imagination of a fine musician.

Fabio Mechetti led the orchestra in an accompaniment, really a partnership, that emphasized the South American rhythmic drive and exotic melodic contours along with the orchestral colors Ginastera derived from composers which as Bartok and Shostakovich. I was strongly impressed by the brilliance of the symphony’s five percussionists who produced sounds that whispered and roared from a battery of more than 30 instruments.

The harp had to be amplified slightly to compete with the colorful array of orchestral sounds, but from where I sat, at least, the sound retained an “acoustic” quality without the roughness of over-amplification.

The remainder of the program, the “Love Scene” from Berlioz’ “Romeo et Juliette” and Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 had many beautiful moments, particularly in the solo playing. But both lacked the riveting attention the orchestra devoted to the concerto.

Berlioz achieved some of his most magical effects suggesting the summer-night atmosphere of Romeo and Juliet’s first night together - with lustrous warmth of low strings and the shimmering of woodwinds. Berlioz was not keen on writing tunes, but the “Love Scene” has one big tune, and the Spokane Symphony cellos and horns played it ardently.

But in Berlioz, as later in the Brahms symphony, there were blemishes: messy moments in highly ornamented passage for violins and woodwind intonation that seemed never quite unanimous (especially noticeable at the ends of phrases and in soft chords) despite the lovely quality that these same players bring to their solos.

In Brahms, Mechetti’s approach to the First Symphony gave equal weight to the composer’s soaring lyric gift and to the stern, “head-down-against-the-wind” quality of his energetic sections. Wonderful solo playing was present from horn principal Margaret Berry, concertmaster Kelly Farris, oboist Keith Thomas, clarinetist Virginia Jones and others. But uncertain intonation surfaced again in the woodwinds. And the Spokane brass seemed always to require a few notes before beginning to play exactly together, diluting the majesty of Brahms’s chordal sections so important in the work’s finale. I found the overall level of attention in the orchestra Friday seriously disappointing, and for a Valentine’s concert, unlovable.

It is only fair to note, though, that most of the Opera House audience accorded the performance of Brahms’s First a standing ovation.

, DataTimes