Symphony’S Program Splendid, Refreshing

Spokane Symphony Orchestra Sunday, Jan. 17, The Met

French music, like French cuisine, tends to be light, tart and colorful. The Spokane Symphony’s menu Sunday afternoon at The Met was all-French - music by Gabriel Faure, Maurice Ravel and Jacques Ibert. The program was a refreshing mix of zippy wit and subtle songfulness.

The soloist was the brilliant flute virtuoso Michael Faust. The concert was led by Elizabeth Stoyanovich, now in the middle of her first season as the symphony’s associate conductor. Faust has appeared in Spokane several times as a guest performer in the Northwest Bach Festival. Stoyanovich led her first all-classical program at The Met Sunday after conducting the program in Coeur d’Alene Saturday night. The concert was repeated Tuesday.

Faust’s previous Spokane performances have been in the 18th-century German repertoire. He proved fully as exciting in the brilliant display and charming lyricism required by Faure’s Fantasie and Ibert’s Concerto as he was in past seasons in the complexities of Bach.

Though German born and trained, Faust seemed to have a complete identification with the witty sparkle and sinuous melodies of these French masters. Judging Stoyanovich’s skills presented a more complicated case. The symphony’s Met series allows this young conductor to capitalize on her strengths: The theater’s intimate setting lets her enthusiastic manner and good humor shine. The less-formal atmosphere permits her to be a bright, articulate spokeswoman for the music in her spoken program notes. And the smaller orchestra used at The Met enabled her to program a whole range of interesting works not appropriate to the vast spaces of the Opera House.

But Stoyanovich’s conductorial hand is not always certain. Accompanying a soloist always looks so easy, but it is the most difficult task a conductor can perform. Stoyanovich’s accompaniments for Faust, were not always rhythmically exact in fast passages, and in louder passages, tended to overwhelm the soloist.

Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Infanta,” with which Stoyanovich opened the concert, had an angular stiffness that placed the performance at odds with Ravel’s almost dream-like lament, weighted as it is with sighs and longing. She brought energy and enthusiasm, but again, not dependable precision to a parade of musical jokes in Ibert’s Divertissement from his score to Labiche’s play “The Italian Straw Hat.”

Later in the program, though, she led the orchestra into some exquisite moments in Ravel’s “Mother Goose” Suite. The quiet passage just before the end, in which Sleeping Beauty awakens, has seldom sounded so beautiful.

There were many splendid orchestral solos Sunday. I found especially admirable the fine playing of clarinetist Eugene Mondie. His warm tone and artful phrasing seemed particularly well-suited to the French style.

The audience was invited to submit questions for the conductor, the soloist and orchestra members. The questions were good ones and Stoyanovich, Faust and orchestra players provided the answers with a engaging display of good humor and intelligence.